022: Exactly How You’ll Learn Hieroglyphs in 10 Weeks

In this episode, Dr. Melinda Nelson-Hurst gives you a full, behind-the-scenes breakdown of her signature program, Scribal School. And she addresses the common question many Egyptophiles have: "How and what exactly can I learn to read in hieroglyphs?"

In this episode, you will discover the step-by-step roadmap to mastering Egyptian hieroglyphs in just 10 weeks in Scribal School.

Scribal School is the robust program that gives you everything you need to walk into a museum or up to tomb and temple walls and read the hieroglyphic texts there. It’s a one-stop-shop for fast-tracking your learning of hieroglyphs.

This program is for Egyptophiles who want to read the real Egyptian texts that they see in museums, online, in books, and on trips to Egypt.

If you’ve ever wondered whether this program is right for you – or what really makes it different from every other hieroglyphs book or program out there – listen in.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• Real Results: the results that real students with busy, unpredictable lives are getting (we’re taking 3x the results in only 10% of the time).

• Who this program is truly for.

• The Foundation of the Pharaohs: Master the basics of the writing system and start reading the names of Pharaohs by the end of your first week.

• Beyond the Textbook: Discover the secret to recognizing hieroglyphs in the real world – such as Princess Sit-Hathoriunet’s bracelets or female Pharaoh Hatshepsut’s ointment jar.

• Decoding the Classics: How to identify the most common texts you will ever encounter.

• Secrets of the Afterlife: The key to reading a massive number of Egyptian texts in museums and gaining a deeper understanding of what ancient Egyptians wanted for their afterlife.

• The Personal Touch: How to unlock a deeper level of understanding and connection with the ancient Egyptians through reading particular hieroglyphic words and phrases that are rarely taught in books or courses.

• Decoding Temples & Tombs: What you’ll learn to read on tomb and temple walls discover what people and gods on the walls are doing, from tending cattle to offering prayers.

• The "Tour Guide" Effect: How this 10-week journey can equip you to read massive columns at Karnak and maybe even be mistaken for a professional guide by your fellow travelers (yes, this really happened to multiple people in Scribal School before!).

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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 back to the podcast. I've got an exciting episode for you today because we're going to talk about exactly how you'll learn hieroglyphs in 10 weeks. We're going to pull back the curtain, so to speak, and bring you behind the scenes with exactly how you can learn hieroglyphs in 10 weeks in my program Scribal School. Now, as of this recording, enrollment for Scribal School is opening in the next 24 hours. So you'll want to head over to Scribalschool.com to get all the details and grab your spot when enrollment opens on May 12th. Now I know you may be wondering about Scribal School and how it works. How long is it? How long will it take to get results and actually be reading real hieroglyphic texts in museums or maybe on a trip you have scheduled coming up? Scribal School is designed so that you can go as fast as you like. So the pace is really up to you. You have an entire year of access so that you can take your time and you can also return and repeat lessons, review throughout the year. But that doesn't mean that you need a year to see results. Absolutely not. In fact, we have a very special opportunity when you enroll in Scribal School before May 21st because we'll be running a special 10-week guided study plan, which includes extra support from me, an expert Egyptologist, a true group experience by studying alongside your peers who are following the same plan and same path, and this clear plan of what to work on when. And from here on, you'll be reading hieroglyphs almost exclusively from actual ancient artifacts, that is like photographs rather than typeset examples. We get into real texts almost immediately in Scribal School because it's so important to work from the real thing rather than just textbook examples, which oftentimes are things you're not really gonna see in real life, and also are frankly just pretty boring when you just see the black and white on the page as opposed to the real ancient artifact that somebody carved or painted or used in everyday life, right? So already during this week, we're gonna start reading texts like those on a bracelet that belonged to a princess named Sit Hathor Yunit. And also we're gonna be reading texts from the famous female pharaoh Hatshepsuit, such as those on a particular ointment jar that was left behind at the building site of Daryl Bakri, her famous funerary temple that's built into the natural rock terraces on the west bank of Thebes or modern Luxor. Now, when we get into week three, we're gonna go even further into these real texts that we're talking about, practicing on the real thing. And this week is super exciting because this is where we get into reading the absolute most common things you will encounter, absolutely will encounter, in museums or on a trip to Egypt, not to mention, of course, also in books and online and pretty much everywhere you look where there might be hieroglyphs. And that's right, in only three weeks, you're already going to be prepared to read these things, the very most common things that you're gonna see. These are going to be things like the pharaoh's titularies. So, like the titles that the king or pharaoh, I use king and pharaoh interchangeably, by the way, because a pharaoh is just a word for a king. And you'll be able to read the pharaoh's titulary, that is, his titles and things that Egyptologists like to call epithets. There's the descriptions of them, as well as the dates that these pharaohs like to leave on a lot of their monuments. So you'll see these on everywhere from like temple walls to uh tombs, as well as individual objects that you'll see in museums. So you can see these on temple walls, just like my student Juan, who was on the podcast last week. If you missed that episode, you can check it out where he was reading texts like this on a temple wall when he was there with a tour group. But it's not just temples. You'll be reading texts like those also on tomb walls, like I mentioned, and also a variety of objects that you might encounter in museums pretty much anywhere in the world. These include things called stele. If you're not familiar with it, what a stela is, this is sort of a stone slab that's been inscribed. They sometimes look like kind of like modern tombstones, although they were used a little bit differently in ancient Egypt. But we have a lot of them in museum collections all over, and they give us some wonderful information about families and about the king and dates and various things like that. So we'll talk about those a little bit more a little later as well. But not just steely, also statues and coffins and jewelry and all kinds of things like that. So we'll be reading exactly these types of texts in scribal school. You'll get to practice on the real thing in the exercises as well as seeing them in lessons, and you'll get to work on these originals and photographs, not just like a typeset copy of them, including original texts that were built into a beautiful pendant that belonged to a princess during the Middle Kingdom period. Now in week four, we get into the first of three of what we call integration weeks. And these are a vital component to the 10-week plan. These weeks are a way to make sure that you keep up your progress and your success with hieroglyphs. These are times that we use to practice, allowing the material to truly soak in and integrate into our brains. So instead of introducing like a new set of lessons or something like that this week, this week is all about getting this actually established in our brains, practicing either also could or working on things that maybe you haven't gotten to yet. Maybe you were really busy the week before, for example. This is a great time to finish going through those lessons that maybe you hadn't finished yet and catch up. This is one of the reasons we have these integration weeks, is because this is built for real life, right? And the way that your brain works also. So we have this space for either catching up and or doing additional practice. You can go back through and practice some more things, um, or even poke around on the internet, maybe look at some museum sites and check out some other texts that you can now read. And this really helps the new things that you're learning actually take true residence in your brain so that this is something that you will have and be able to use in the real world, not just when you're sitting down at your desk with an exercise, for example. And so this is why we have three of these throughout. We'll talk about the other ones coming up because they are such a vital component with ensuring that these things really do establish a place in your brain and help you continue making that progress so you're prepared for the next time you encounter an Egyptian text. So from there in week five, we're going to get into texts related to the afterlife. So if you're interested in ancient Egypt, you probably are already aware of the fact that a lot of the things that we have that survive from ancient Egypt relate to burial and beliefs of the afterlife. So there's just tons of this material in museums. And also, of course, when you visit Egypt, you'll see a lot of it as well. But anywhere in the world with an Egyptian collection, you are going to encounter materials that have some kind of relationship to burial and the afterlife. So having practiced and consolidated in our minds those first three weeks of material and amazing texts, we're now going to expand into understanding, like I said, these texts relating to the afterlife. And in particular, we're going to focus on something called offering prayer, or sometimes called the offering formula. And this is a really close second when it comes to most common texts you're going to see. So we talked about in week three, dealing with the very most common. These are just like one little notch below that, as terms of how common they are. So when you learn this, that you're going to be able to read so many more things that you see in museums. And combined with what you've already learned in the previous weeks, you're going to be equipped to read a really large number of the texts that you encounter. This is really going to cover an awful lot of it when you walk into a museum. So you'll be reading these in Scribal School in the materials. So there'll be lots of exercises as always with the real artifacts. So you get to work on real text. So you're actually prepared for the real thing when you see it in person as well, and prepared to read these new ones from across the world. Whether you are going to the Metropolitan Museum in New York or you're going to be visiting Cairo, perhaps, or maybe there's a small local museum in your town that has a small collection. I guarantee you're going to run into some of these things that you've already learned just in the first few weeks. You'll be ready to tackle the very most common text that you're going to see there. And you'll be seeing these kinds of texts that when I talk about offering prayers, where you might wonder, okay, but what kinds of things do we see these on? They occur on a large variety of objects. So they are on tomb walls. So if you're visiting Egypt, you're likely to see them there. And you can also see them on steely, like we talked about before, those stone or sometimes wooden slabs. And definitely on statues, you'll see them a lot, and also on coffins, all things that you're going to see in museums throughout the world. Then in week six, we get into an area that I have to say is sort of near and dear to my heart because I think it's so important because it really expands our understanding of what was important to actual ancient Egyptians. Not just what's flashy or fancy, but what they really prized. And this is, might sound mundane, but this is their names, their titles, and their family relationships. This is both for pharaohs, we'll be seeing pharaohs' names and relationships, as well as for non-royal people as well. And these were absolutely vital to the ancient Egyptians and their sense of who they were and how they fit into ancient Egyptian society. And because they were so important to them, again, this is something you are going to see all over the place because it was so important for them to display for you and for other ancient Egyptians who their family members were and who they were. What was their name? They're so concerned with this. You'll even find texts where they talk about wanting to ensure that people don't damage their name on their objects, whether it's a tomb wall or a stila or a statue, right? It was of vital importance to them that their name was on it and that it would survive and nobody would remove it. And this is an area that sadly is really left out of almost all curriculum out there, regardless of how good or bad the curriculum is in terms of how it's structured and so forth. Honestly, this is just left out or glossed over the vast majority of the time. And that's one of the reasons why I really was really excited to be able to have a chance to add this into scribal school and have it available, because it is, again, like I said, such a central thing to the ancient Egyptians themselves. And learning how to read how the ancient Egyptians describe themselves is exciting because it gives you this glimpse into their thoughts and their priorities in a way that you just won't see anywhere else. And this is an area that, like I said, is really skipped in most places, which I really think is such a shame and a missed opportunity. Because not only will it give you a unique perspective on ancient Egyptian people, but this knowledge will also help you with reading about people on everything from eye makeup containers to tomb walls to the princess Sitamun's throne, which was made of wood and then is decorated with gold leaf on the pictures and also the hieroglyphs. And many of these are actual objects that ancient Egyptians used during their lives, not only carved or painted or created, but actually used in their daily life. Then in week seven, we have another integration week because, again, this is so important for implementing what you've been learning. If you did get a little behind because you were busy or something like that in the previous week or two, this is a wonderful time to work on that material and get caught up. Also, a wonderful time to practice, process, and integrate what you've been learning in these previous weeks, especially the last two, but really for the whole time as well. And this is a crucial time to take a step back from new material and let these things truly soak in as you practice the things that we've been learning. So you'll be ready to walk into a museum and walk up to objects like statues, eye makeup holders, thrones, et cetera, and read the hieroglyphs on them. And once we've done that, we've really integrated this, these previous weeks into our brains, right? We're ready for week eight. And this is a week that's an interesting area to get into too. It's a little bit different than what we've been doing before, but again, is a really useful one that because you'll see this stuff in many, many places. Now, have you ever looked at maybe a tomb or temple wall or even maybe a stela in a museum and seen people on there doing various things, and you wondered to yourself, what the heck are these people doing? I know I have definitely at times, and I think we're I'm probably in good company with many of you. And so in this week, in week eight, we're gonna learn how to read the captions that accompany these scenes. So the ancient Egyptians do often include captions that tell you what's going on in these scenes, what people are doing. And this also kind of clues you into why what this person was doing was important, and also just the fact that they thought that this was important, right? This is another element that brings you into the ancient Egyptians' own thought process in terms of what they valued and what was important enough to them to use up very expensive real estate on their tomb walls or other artifacts, which were extremely expensive to manufacture. So, what you'll learn this week opens up this entirely new door, really, to this material and one you can walk through and understand what's going on on the other side. Because now, when you see these scenes on walls in Egypt or on objects in a museum, you'll know whether someone is, say, bringing a food offering, or maybe they're taking care of cattle, or they're saying a prayer for somebody. And you'll know if somebody is a god, a king, or a non-royal person, you'll truly grasp what's happening in these scenes and be able to interpret them for others too. So if you have friends or family with you, or you might even attract other people around you, such as people on your tour group when you're in Egypt. This has happened to many of my students before. And you'll be able to share this new insight, this open door moment where you're able to walk through and see what's going on, you can share this with them as well. Now in week nine, we have our third and final integration week. This is this week is great for either catching up on some of the previous lessons, if things got busy again, and you want, or you want to circle back and practice some more. Both of those are wonderful uses of integration weeks. And rather than jumping to the next thing too soon, which is really, really common, both when people work on their own or when they're following somebody else's curriculum that doesn't take real life and real brain structures into account, they often will just jump too soon to the next thing. Instead, we're gonna take a step back again and practice. And this allows you the space to actually learn and absorb the material, which is so crucial for success and sets you up to continue into week 10 as well as to be successful anytime you go walk into a museum. So in week 10, we're going to unlock another set of things that you can read that's going to be a variety of narratives. So this is a bit different than some of the other things we've done, right? This is actual narrative descriptions of what people and gods have done in the past. And in these lessons and practice texts, you'll be reading everything from parts of biographies, you could call them autobiographies, really, to speeches of the gods. And one of the wonderful things about learning how to read these types of texts is that they allow us to look into two distinct aspects of ancient Egyptian life and beliefs. Autobiographies, for example, paint a picture of what people wanted to be known for, what they wanted to be remembered for, right? This sort of paints a kind of ideal picture of them and what they really wanted you to know and whatnot you to think about them, what was considered an upstanding way to live. And then the other distinct aspect is the speeches of the gods, right? And this fills in the picture that we started to paint in week eight by allowing us to read what the gods are saying to the pharaoh on temple walls and columns. So in week eight, in the captions, we learned how to read what the king was doing, or the pharaoh, if you if you'd like to use that term, is doing for a god. These captions describe the king, for example, giving offerings to the gods, completing various rituals or other tasks for them. Now, this week we'll fill this in by reading what how the gods respond to this action and reward the king for his care of them. So this really completes like the full picture that you get of a lot of these scenes that you'll see on temples when you go to Egypt. So many, many of these scenes that you see where you'll see a pharaoh standing across, you know, facing a god, whether this might be a male deity or a female deity or a group of deities, even. And almost always, this is what's going on in these scenes with the text, right? We have a caption telling you what the action is, and we have a speech from the god responding. So when you learn this, this unlocks a tremendous amount of these temple walls that you'll see when you visit Egypt. But it's not just temple walls. This act these actually show up on stele, like we've mentioned before, also in museums where you can see captions of people doing things and also people also speaking about what they've done in the past and these kinds of autobiographical sorts of formats, right? And talking about what they did during their life. So it unlocks again this variety that you'll see when you're in Egypt, but you can also see from home, whether it's through photographs or visiting your local museum or browsing around online, reading books, etc. And we'll combine this with what we were learning in the earlier weeks to create a full body of knowledge that you can use to read a wide variety of texts in museums or in books online or on a trip to Egypt. So you'll be re able to read texts on everything from statues, coffins, and jewelry to reading tomb and temple walls, and even the massive columns at temples like the Ramesseum and Karnak Temple. Now, in just 10 weeks, you're equipped to encounter, read, and understand such a huge variety of ancient Egyptian texts. The ones that you're actually going To see when you go to Egypt, when you read books at home, when you browse the internet, or when you visit a museum. You might even be mistaken for a guide at your local museum, or when you're in Egypt with a tour group, like my student Juan did and he talked about in the podcast last week, or like my student Michelle had happened. She said, quote, I had a trip to Egypt last year and everyone in our group thought they had won the lottery with me being an extra tour guide and reading all the walls for them. So fun. So come join us to finally fulfill your dream of reading hieroglyphs. Doris's Scribal School opened May 12th, but only for a limited time. So you'll want to head over to scribalschool.com to get all the info and grab your spot in the program. Let's do this. Let's learn hieroglyphs in 10 weeks together. And I can't wait to support you and guide you along the way.