021: How Marc Learned Hieroglyphs in 1 Hour a Week

In this episode, Dr. Melinda sits down with her student, Marc, to discuss his journey from a childhood fascination with King Tutankhamun to sight-reading ancient hieroglyphs in world-class museums.

Marc shares his frustrations with traditional, confusing textbooks and explains how a structured, pattern-based approach allowed him to unlock the secrets of ancient texts even with a demanding career and busy schedule.

Whether you are a curious beginner or have struggled with self-study in the past, this conversation reveals how ancient scripts can become accessible and rewarding through the right community and curriculum.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
• The Museum Gap: Discover why even advanced university students often struggle to read what they see in a gallery – and how to focus your study on the formulaic patterns actually found on museum walls.

• The Power of 1 Hour: Learn how a busy professional with family and hobbies can make incredible progress using spaced repetition and just one hour of study per week.

• Beyond Emojis and Symbols: Uncover the truth about whether hieroglyphs are just symbols or a complex language, and how to demystify the script by focusing on its foundational building blocks.

• The "Cartouche Moment": Hear the serendipitous story of how Marc was able to spot and read a Ramses II necklace in the wild, without ever specifically memorizing that Pharaoh’s name.

• Textbooks vs. Structure: Find out why many popular books leave students feeling pull-your-hair-out frustrated and how a curated curriculum differentiates between core concepts and niche details to keep you moving forward.

• Community over Solitude: Explore the benefits of an online community where you can get answers in real-time and join a guided study plan that fits any time zone or schedule.

• Investing in Yourself: A look at why Marc believes that it’s important to invest in yourself and that learning an ancient language is a worthwhile and rewarding personal journey.

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Scribal School is now open! 🎉

Scribal School​ is my robust program that gives you everything you need to walk into a museum or up to tomb and temple walls and read the texts there.

Be a part of the 2026 Guided Study Plan for extra support and accountability (only one of 2026!).

Enrollment closes at 11:59pm ET on Thursday (May 21)!

Learn more and register for Scribal School here: https://scribalschool.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Voices of Ancient Egypt, the podcast for people who don't just want to learn about ancient Egypt, but want to understand it on a deeper, more meaningful level. I'm Melinda Nelsonhurst, an Egyptologist with a PhD in the field and years of experience teaching at the university level, working in Egypt and training students around the world to read real ancient Egyptian texts. I've spent decades studying this civilization in a traditional academic setting, so you don't have to. And so you can access knowledge that's usually locked behind academic walls. This podcast brings ancient Egyptian history, beliefs, and language to life and shows you that learning hieroglyphs is possible no matter your age, background, or schedule. So whether you want to read hieroglyphs in museums, on social media, or on your next trip to Egypt, you'll find the tools, stories, and encouragement to make it real right here. Let's hear the voices of the ancient world together. Hello, hello, and welcome to the Voices of Ancient Egypt podcast. In this episode, we'll be featuring an interview with one of my students. This is part of a series I'm calling What's Working with Learning Hieroglyphs, where I interview students of mine to find out what strategies and tactics they're using to make tons of progress with hieroglyphs. These are real people with busy lives and commitments and also a whole lot of unexpected challenges in life. And we're gonna get down in the trenches with them and hear how they've been able to learn to read everything from common pharaohs' names to literature, letters, medical texts, and even the book of the dead. Let's jump in and hear what's really working for these real people. I've got a student of mine, Mark, with me here today. And I'm so excited to hear more about his story with you. Welcome to the podcast, Mark.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

Lovely to have you. And I'd love for you to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about you and what initially brought you to wanting to learn hieroglyphs. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

My name is Mark. I've been studying with Melinda. Uh, what brought me to you? Um a really vivid early childhood memory of uh my aunt who lived in Manhattan, and she had a uh a book on her library shelf that was the treasures of Tutankhamun. Um and it was the book that you could buy at the Met when the the last time the exhibit traveled to America, and it had that sort of iconic picture of the death mask that everyone kind of thinks about when they think about ancient Egypt. And uh I just remembered that that image sort of being seared in my brain. And every time I went to her house, I just kind of looked at it. Um and then one night I was doing some research on, I think, on that book. Could I get a copy of it for myself? Um, and through some, I think Wikipedia sort of linking and spelunking, it was this like, oh, there's hieroglyphs, and you can learn to read them. And it was this like, what? I think we all have these preconceived notions about what those hieroglyphs are. Are they emojis? Are they something else? Are they are they symbols? Um, and uh a little bit of additional searching beyond that led me to Melinda's videos, um, which I think had a very different name. Like I think it was like the Dead Speaks or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 3:21

Yeah, the channel did originally have a different name that was the Dead Speak Online before I changed it to Voices of Ancient Egypt. Yeah, so the the oldest videos still have that on there in the intro.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

And Amber read uh watching a couple of videos going like, okay, this is really well done material and this is super interesting, and like uh I'm pretty good at internet things, so I'm gonna go find her. So I I found you and reached out and sent an email and basically just sort of introduced myself. And I think if I remember correctly, I was asking for any advice on learning to read. Um, and I think that's kind of how we got connected.

SPEAKER_00 3:54

Right, yep. And then you were in one of my sort of earliest iterations of a program even before I had started up Scribal School, and then you joined Scribal School when um Scribal School came around to you. So I'd like to uh r sort of rewind to that moment for a minute and let's talk about sort of like where you were before that, what sort of problems maybe you were looking to solve by joining, um, or what goals did you have and and how did all of that go?

SPEAKER_01 4:22

I think at that point I had a couple of books. I had the Allen, I had a couple of the other sort of like really popular books. Um, and I gotten a couple of printouts from I think uh a college university that had kind of uh their their syllabus online that it had sort of the mono, the the the the single sound consonants. Um and I could kind of read those and and and I'd gotten pretty interested in like, okay, well, this is an M and this is a Ka, and this is this is uh you know these these different sort of like symbolic sounds, but I couldn't read anything. And the books were very confusing and hard to sort of self-study with. Um, there was no structure there. It was just like uh I felt more confused than I did before I started with the books. Um and getting into what wasn't called scribal school at that point, but the sort of the early classes with you, um, it was amazing to see that there was a structured way to learn um the language. And like many things in modern languages, there's a lot of formulaic text that repeats often. And once you kind of got the primer to those things, you realize that you unlocked a huge amount of the text that was out there, both in the funerary text and the walls of the different things. And I remember going to a museum in Manhattan some number of years after that, page 21 or 22, and being able to read a decent amount of the stuff on the on the walls there because it was so formulaic and and the class provided a foundation to sort of focus on those recurring patterns and recurring formulas that none of the books out there did much talking about. I mean, they're they're all in there. They all talked about in OSEGMS and the funerary text and the offering formula and that kind of stuff, but never presented in a way of like, no, no, this is the first thing you have to learn because you're gonna see it everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

I love that. Yeah, those are a wonderful point, and it's one of the big differences, right, that you find sometimes in books or in other sources compared to the approach in scribal school, like you were mentioning, that there's a heavy focus on the stuff that you're actually gonna see when you go to a museum, right? Um, and so that's why you're able to then apply that when you went to the Met or or other places. And um that was something that was very intentional for me because also as a student, I had a similar experience when I was learning in terms of even when I was in formal graduate classes, if I walked into a museum gallery, I could read hardly anything at that point because that's not what we were learning. You know, we we were learning only some very specific, very niche things really in among literature, which were not even in hieroglyphs. So they weren't the things you were gonna see on on display. So I think that's a I I've heard from other students of mine also that's a really common experience that even if they feel like they get part of the way through things, it's like they're still not able to really read anything. Um, so I love that you were able to do that and and get a chance to apply it. I'd love to hear um a little bit more, I guess, about what's changed for you and experiences you've had. Because I know from conversations we've had in the past that you have a very busy life between career and family and multiple hobbies. And because you have a lot going on, that you've typically put in about an hour a week when studying hieroglyphs. So I'd love to hear more about sort of what's changed for you just from working on that like hour a week in scribal school and the related materials and um you know how things are different now. You kind of alluded to it with visiting the Met, for example, but whether it's you know, visiting a museum like that or maybe something you saw online, or that you ran into hieroglyphs in an unexpected place, and maybe you had kind of one of those moments where you're just kind of impressed yourself and were like, whoa.

SPEAKER_01 8:22

Totally. Yeah, a couple of things come to mind. One is like, um, I think for myself who didn't really study a second language formally in school, um, language acquisition happened before I have much of a memory. And I think like most babies, it happens pretty intuitively and you don't really think about it. So, so this notion of like, well, what would it look like to learn a new language? Is it rope memorization? Is it, is it just study more and it will all of a sudden come? And I found for me that um I ended up doing a thing intuitively for me that you gave a good name for called spaced repetition, um, that ended up working out really well for me, which is like that hour a week doesn't seem like it's gonna be a lot, but over time it just starts to work. It's a little bit hard to explain how and why, um, but just all of a sudden in class, and even in sometimes I was at the museum, um, I would just look at a word and know what it was, and didn't have to think about it. And and it it, you know, you see this a lot when you you you teach kids to read. And I taught my son to read. It was like, you know, you go from the sounding out of the letters, and then eventually kids can see words, and then eventually they can see sentences and paragraphs, and and then at some point it just becomes this sort of automatic, automatic thing where you can just read. Um and that just happened to me very sort of in intuitively and and sort of holistically over the years. I've been studying this of like certain concepts just because I've been repeating them. And since the curriculum is set up to sort sort of support that, where you're seeing these patterns over and over again, um, that you just know them. I had a recent experience with uh an acquaintance who was wearing uh a little cartouche necklace. Uh and uh I I knew she was Middle Eastern and but didn't know where she was from. I said, Oh, that's a really beautiful cartouche. And she says, Oh yeah, that that my you know my mother gave this thing, I've been wearing this, you know, for 50 years kind of thing. And she says it means strength. And I looked at it and went, No, it doesn't. Like not to not to not to break sort of a thing for you, but that's that's Ramses the second. And and sure, he was a very strong leader in the history of Egypt, but that doesn't mean strength to anybody else. That's just his name. And she was as shocked. And and I remember uh sending you an email about that experience, going like I had this really neat experience. Where like I I don't remember studying the cartouches. The only cartouche I studied was was was was King Tut, because I have this beautiful wood wood carving of his that I I love. Um, but I I never really did the king's list, I didn't really spend a lot of time reading uh royal cartouches, but I quickly could get Ramasu from from from looking at that. And it was just like, all right, like there's something about these foundational building blocks that if you have them and you're comfortable with them, you can do new things you've never seen before. And that was like a moment where it's just like, you know, and I think I took a little bit of break from you, you've done frugal school kind of continuously over those years, and I've taken some breaks, work's gotten pretty heavy. And I I haven't been actually studying, and I was still able to look at that necklace and go, I know what that says. And that was essentially really an amazingly rewarding thing of um think about where I started in 2017, 2018, to just sort of being interested in it and being curious about what the language is, to sort of being able to sight read things that I'd never seen before.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

I love that. That's awesome. And amazing that you were able to do that. Because, like you said, it's not like you necessarily had been specifically studying to try to read that particular thing, even, but all those pieces came together for you when you encountered something out of the blue. You weren't even planning to. It's not like you went into a museum going, I'm gonna read some stuff, right? Correct. And you just ran into it and had that um one of those amazing kind of uh serendipitous moments, right? Where it all came together.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

Totally.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

So sometimes I hear from people who are thinking about learning hieroglyphs, they're thinking about maybe joining scribal school in order to do that, but a lot of times they're worried that maybe it's gonna be too difficult for them, or they you know, they feel like hieroglyphs seems like a really difficult thing, or maybe they've even tried it before, like with a book, like you mentioned, trying a book before, and it didn't they didn't feel like they really got it, and so they're worried that maybe this is just something that they you know can't do, or it's gonna be too hard. And so I'd love to hear um a bit about sort of how you overcame that challenge um and made all this progress that you have and and um how you would think about that sort of uh potential difficulty and the compared to you know maybe trying to have studied it another way and feeling like, ooh, that just didn't work.

SPEAKER_01 13:11

I think I think what's unique about studying with you is the way that you present the material. If you look at like a book, it's sort of a flat list of words or glyphs, and and um you sort of have to deal with them sequentially, one at a time, left to right, right to left, up down, whatever the directionality is of the text you're looking at. You do a really good job of saying, okay, here's the words that you are studying now. Here's the ones that are sort of like in in scope for the conversation, and here's the glossary of the ones that aren't gonna come up that that often. I don't want you to memorize. They're not really important for you, they're not part of the core concept of the lesson. But for completeness, if you want to see what the whole thing says, here's the glossary of these words. Um, because it is a complicated and complex language, and there are even between the thousands of years it was written, it's changed a lot, and different scribes use different things. And I mean, there's a huge amount of variety in how this fairly academic language is sort of uh discussed and described. But you sort of demystify that a whole bit, and it's just like, well, here's the little faction I want you to do, and and this is within the skills and scopes of things that you have. And is it easy? No. Um, but is it like pull your hair out hard? Of course not. I mean, the the resources are there, um, and the whole online community is very helpful. So if you're stuck in a spot, I don't have to wait for next week's class. I can just go on to the community and ask, does anybody know what this is? And the other thing that I think is is important is even if you can't make every single class because life comes up and and time zones can be hard and just things are unpredictable, they're always recorded. You can always go back and review them. Um, even for the ones that you are present in, you can go back and review. Um, so the the information couldn't be more accessible and it couldn't be presented in a clearer way. Like I think that that's really the benefit of the class and the way that it's structured is like there's an achievable goal. You have to put in a little bit of work, but you get a lot of reward back from that because you end up with a thing where it's just like, hey, I just read four lines or five lines of uh of a stile, um, and I know what it means. And and especially considering, you know, the there's a big difference between the the ways that the culture wrote hieroglyphs. So like no, this was the religious and sort of like uh the king, the the kingly and the royal sort of like this was for the educated high class. So they weren't writing about normal, average, everyday things. They were writing about power and death and and kings and and family relationships and things all related to the afterlife and and stuff. So it's not like you have to have this incredible scope of words, it's like it's it's a little bit more uh what's the run through to think about a constrained in the sense. So the topic matters are constrained. Um and since the hieroglyphs that are that are inscribed into those stones were written by people who could read, um, which was only the highest class of the citizens at that time, you don't get random writing. It's not a love letter from this person to that person, it's not a tax document like that. That's written in hieratic and the languages that we don't study. But like the stuff that's in scope that you're gonna see at museums if you go to Egypt, if you're looking at these books, it's gonna be the hieroglyphic texts. And I think that makes it a lot more palatable because there is just a lot less surface area of the language.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

That's great. You bring up a few great points there, I think, in terms of, like you said, it's sort of um, it's it's a very doable thing because you if you focus on the right things, right? It's not that you have to do, you know, every 10 million different details of things, but you can have that sort of constrained view that gets you a lot of results when it comes to actually reading those hieroglyphic texts. And you also pointed out the um the community and how you have access to the community too. So if you have questions or you want to share something, that that's that online community is available for scribal school students all the time. So you don't have to wait for any time in particular. You can always ask stuff in there, and um, I'm in there answering things, but also there's a whole bunch of other people in Scribal School who are lovely at answering things and um uh sometimes getting back you know faster than I do with that. And um, and you mentioned, you know, also the calls, uh, and uh we do have a guided study plan coming up very soon that will include some calls with me through that time. But even if you can't make it because of time zone, like you said, they're always recorded and questions can be submitted in advance too, so everybody can get their questions answered on those. And that's one of the things I actually I really love about this is that people can participate from all over and um with all kinds of different schedules, whether it's you know, uh one like yours that's pretty packed, or you know, or they might be halfway around the world in Australia, or you know, whatever that it can make it it can it can work for all of those sorts of different kinds of situations. Um so as we wind down, uh I know there's gonna be some folks out there who are considering joining Scribal School as we're opening up soon, and you know, they might have a lot of hesitations or questions and they're not really sure if it's the right fit for them, or maybe it's not the right time. They're evaluating their options. And so they're sort of on the fence with trying to make this decision. And I was wondering what you would say to somebody who is in that situation of thinking about joining scribal school.

SPEAKER_01 18:44

I think there's one of these like um sort of like it's a personal decision, but it's and I mean personal in a different sense, not like everyone makes their own decision, but uh, you know, we have a lot of obligations in life. We have family, we have work, we have things we have to do. That this sort of falls into a category of stuff that, like, at least for myself, this is for me. Um, this is for my own curiosity, for my own edification, for my own enjoyment. And we don't get to do that that often, right? Like it's very rare that you get to make a decision where it's just like this is just for me, it's just for my own intellect and curiosity intellectual curiosity, it's for my own development. Um, and it's good to make room for those kind of things. It's very rewarding to put yourself first occasionally. Um, I think everything else feels like it's like uh yeah on a long list of to-dos and worries and things that that feel like obligations. This never felt like an obligation. It was just like, do I want to invest some money and some time? And and every time I did it, I always felt good at in the classes and and afterwards. And and it's just this, again, it's it's a very sort of the personal thing for each of us to make a decision that the best way to spend their time. But you know, if you're interested in this, I don't think there's a better way to learn it, right? Like if this, if this is a goal of yours, like there's no better teacher, there's no better system and curriculum than this. I I've tried all the books. There was a self-self-guided email group that I was in some number of years ago that was so completely over my head and moved so fast and just seemed to leave the beginners behind in life that just never happened here. Um, and I just found it a very rewarding thing. I've made some friends from this, from these classes that I still keep touch with. Um, so it's been a really cool community and really positive experience. So I would say if you can swing it and you can allot even a little bit of time, like you don't have to be, oh, 10 hours a week. You know, this is not a PhD that you're doing for yourself. This is something for your own personal enjoyment, even an hour a week, or there's been weeks I didn't have any hours and I still made progress. Just being in the class and immersing was totally worthwhile. So I would say do it. It's a really wonderful experience.

SPEAKER_00 20:48

Thank you so much, Mark. It's been a pleasure having you on the podcast and getting a chance to chat and hear a bit more of your story. I can't wait to see where you go from here.

SPEAKER_01 20:57

Thanks so much, Melinda, for having me. Have a great day.