We’ve featured Egyptologist Ilona Regulski here on Open Culture a few times before. Once, she explained how to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs; another time, she told us what the Rosetta Stone actually says. It was, perhaps, inevitable that she would cross paths with Rob Watts, creator of the YouTube channel RobWords, whose videos we often post. When he made the journey to Berlin’s Neues Museum, and specifically to its Egyptian Museum, Regulski was the expert he sought out to tell him — and us — all about how hieroglyphs, literally “sacred carvings,” actually make words.
Faced with a stone chiseled full of hieroglyphs, where do we start? Ancient Egyptian texts are all read from top to bottom, but some go left to right, and others right to left. To know which way, Regulski says, we must first look for symbols with a clear front and back, such as those in human or animal shapes.
Some names are written in blocks, themselves read from top to bottom — unless they contain a sign referring to a god, which, of course, gets customarily elevated to the top. But even if we understand the exact order in which we should read a given string of hieroglyphs, the question remains: how do we actually do that reading?
Though many hieroglyphs do appear to be figurative, with their recognizable forms of birds, bugs, arms, legs, and such, only sometimes are they meant to represent what they look like. Regulski explains that some of these signs are letters, and can be pronounced in much the same way as our own alphabet. What looks like a mouth sounds like an r; a highly abstracted bread loaf, t; a horned viper, ph; an owl, m. There is, of course, more to it. Signs can be combined not just to indicate sound, but also to disambiguate meaning. As you may have noticed, hieroglyphic writing is also what Watts calls a “vowel-free zone.” Exactly which of those sounds go where is, like certain other unresolved aspects of hieroglyphs, a matter of ongoing expert inquiry. But Egyptologists, as seeing Regulski in action reminds us, are a dedicated bunch.
Related content:
How to Read Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A British Museum Curator Explains
How to Carve Hieroglyphs Just Like the Ancient Egyptians Did
You Could Soon Be Able to Text with 2,000 Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs
What the Rosetta Stone Actually Says
What Ancient Egyptian Sounded Like & How We Know It
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Your article popped up on my phone this morning and I read it immediately. I am researcher and author Legesse Allyn (https://jallynconsulting.com/TheDigitalDivine).
After identifying the spoken language of the hieroglyphs in 1991, between 2009 and 2026 I’ve published 27 books containing over 3000 word matches between the hieroglyphs and the language I identified. Needless to say, Egyptologists don’t like me very much, especially the PhDs who spent over $100,000 on their education that says the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic language is a “dead” one.
Then I come along in 2009 and give them the spoken language, meaning they have to spend more time and money learning the language ancient Greek historian Diodorus had already written was the language of both the Egypt founders and their letters — Ethiopians.
Your article is right about how to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. And if your readers know Amharic and Tigrigna, know somebody who does, or learns the two languages, they can easily not only learn the words, but actually SPEAK the ancient Egyptian language, even as it is still spoken today in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Not PhD Egyptologist gibberish. No, the real language spoken still by nearly 100 million people.
If you want some dirt on me, just go over to the Hall of Maat forum for some laughs, as the Egyptologists there try to do an intervention with me, and get me to see the foolishness of my ways, in two week-long threads each…
https://www.maatforum.com/forum/read.php?6,514543,514661
https://www.maatforum.com/forum/read.php?6,514543,516038#msg-516038
You’ll be happy that the intervention didn’t work, and since that time after they posted my first book (the forum owner posted that my book wasn’t worth wasting her money on), I went on to publish 26 more books, which in 2018 began, completely by accident, weeding out misogynistic male Egyptologists’ 19th century lies about ancient women.
Starting in 2018, I began seeing that beginning with Champollion, the Frenchman during the time of the Trans-Atlantic African slavery (yes, the French kidnapped and sold Africans into slavery), were intentionally mischaracterizing Africans as inhuman monkeys. This was solely to further their enslavement and forced labor of African slavery, because at the time the best farmers in the world who could single-handedly alleviate the European and Jamestown famines (that included cannibalism) were the African farmers they kidnapped.
Not only that, but for women, I began more accurately retranslating ancient text that supposedly supported men’s misogyny surrounding ancient women, supposedly that women were weak, the fall of mankind, and we’re not ALLOWED to own land. Well, that was true beginning in ancient Greece after the 400-year ancient Greek “Dark Greek Age”, when the ancient Greek men slammed the women for the famine, starvation and suffering (actually caused by drought), which ended 850BC (2800 years ago).
The ancient texts I began reinterpreting based on the REAL language of the hieroglyphs (both Egyptian and ancient written Greek) revealed that for these nearly 3000 years, women were vilified in ancient writings around the world in mistranslated ancient texts that have hidden the true power of ancient women, and today lies being reinforced by misogynistic PhD Egyptologist men (and their unsuspecting female PhD counterparts).
I started reinterpreting these ancient texts across the ancient world that revealed women owned EVERYTHING — all land, farms and markets were owned by women, powerful queens with the same title across the ancient world: MOTHER, OWNER, COMMANDER. That’s right. Ancient men owned nothing. They certainly weren’t allowed to distribute food.
But starting 2800 years ago, the ancient Greek men stripped their mothers and grandmothers of their land, forbid women from governance, and began confining women to the house. Then in their answer to famine and starvation, the ancient Greek men went around the ancient world plundering women’s farms from Greece to India and to Egypt, supported by their so-called PHILOSOPHY, which says it’s okay to plunder your neighbours’ farms if you’re hungry.
And today you can see how devisive men can be, continuing to hold women back, all based on the lie that women have never had rights and therefore shouldn’t expect it now.
What happened to me, a male in Western society to betray the very Western misogyny I’ve be endowed? I grew up with only sisters. Yup, I have no brothers.
So, growing up, I already learned what I am today revealing from ancient texts today: if there’s a woman in the room, I know I’m not the boss!
Very simple. All men would do good to learn this, else learn it in divorce.
So, all my books since and including 2018, are focused on bringing out the truth that’s revealed when retranslating ancient texts with REAL LANGUAGE. And this is why Egyptologists hate me, because I’m breaking the nearly 3000 years of misogynistic hold Western men have had on women — the real target of Western men’s hatred. Yes, they even hate the power of their own mothers.
So when you visit the Hall of Maat forum and read the disgusting way they treated me, notice they never examined my words, decoded my method, nor showed me the errors of my ways. They could only express shock, scorn, and retribution.
But they couldn’t stop me. And their intervention had no teeth.
At my website https://jallynconsulting.com/TheDigitalDivine you can download my books in PDF for free, and read for yourself the who, what, when, how and why men have betrayed women after 4.4 million years of our fossil record of women nurturing children, families, the Earth’s environment… and yes, even these misogynistic men.
Thank you for the article!
Yes, Ancient Egyptians must recognise as African Culture. Predominantly their spoken language were from Horn of Africa