Online Course: Beyond Beginners Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs

EES Language Courses will be taught on Tuesday evenings by Joseph Clayton. Recordings will be made available for those unable to attend the live sessions!

Whether you just want to impress your friends and family in a museum or on holiday in Egypt, or you want to learn the basics of the ancient Egyptian language with a view to further study, this is the course for you.

We will concentrate on the hieroglyphs of the Middle Kingdom (c. 2000-1600 BCE), but you’ll be able to apply a lot of what you have learnt to monuments from all periods of pharaonic history. In this course, we’ll continue to look at how the Egyptians expressed themselves on their funerary monuments while learning some basic grammar as we go along.

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to read some of the most common inscriptions found on monuments and in museums as well as knowing other useful things for continuing your study of the Ancient Egyptian language.

This course continues where our Online Course: Beginners Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs left off and assumes that you are familiar with how the hieroglyphic writing system works but don’t necessarily know any grammar. You might have done a beginners’ class before or read the first few chapters of a teach-yourself book. In fact, you could easily join this course if you have a look at one of those books over the summer and the first lesson will be a recap of what we did in the last course. Please get in touch with [email protected] if you want to discuss the level.

There are no tests or exams but each week, but to practise what we have learnt, a simple task will be given to do at home. These tasks will be optional.

Book

Tutor

Joseph Clayton is a specialist in the Ancient Egyptian Language. He has a PhD in Egyptian Philology/Linguistics from the University of Liverpool and taught Ancient Egyptian language at Birkbeck College, University of London for nearly twenty years. He is the author of Mental Illnesses in the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Heart: a reassessment of §§854a–855z of the Ebers Medical Papyrus (2021).

Course Dates

Tuesday 5th September, 18:00-19:30 (UK) time
Week one – Recap of how to read hieroglyphs – Go through all the things we did in the last course with some trickier readings of words.

Tuesday 12th September, 18:00-19:30 (UK) time
Week two – Dates and numbers – Constructing dates in Ancient Egyptian, writing numbers and fractions, and more titles of gods.

Tuesday 19th September, 18:00-19:30 (UK) time
Week three – Captions – Labelling pictures.

Tuesday 26th September, 18:00-19:30 (UK) time
Week Four – The stela of Sebekkhu – His hetep-di-nesu formula and describing a person’s good character.

Tuesday 3rd October, 18:00-19:30 (UK) time
Week Five – The stela of Sebekkhu continued – His description of the background to the most important event of his life.

Recordings of the live sessions will be made available to attendees following the weekly session for those unable to attend in person. 

Tickets

Members of the Egypt Exploration Society can book at a heavily discounted rate. If you’re not yet a member but would like to join in order to receive this discount, please ensure that you have joined here. If you are a Cairo Associate, then please contact our Cairo Office to reserve your discounted tickets: [email protected] 

Register for your place in advance using the links below. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the course. Links for joining the event will be sent by email. If you do not receive your email, then please check your junk folders before contacting the Egypt Exploration Society. The course will be held on our Zoom platform and attendees will be able to interact by asking questions, using the chat and polls. It is not necessary to have a working webcam or microphone for this course. The online course will be complemented by Google Drive, where resources will be uploaded.

Please ensure that you have read our guide to attending EES online events before the course begins.