I was wondering how many people here can read hieroglyphics.
It would certainly be helpful to know who can make translations for future reference. Please be honest.
I think I fall under Scribe in training.

Where's the "No Knowledge" option?? lol That's what I would be under lol

i can read heriglyphics. it's easy, really. u just memorize the letters, practice writng them, and always remember that if one symbol is on top of another, u read the first one first, and that u read it from the way the animals are facing.

It's not quite as simple as that at all. Many times when you're translating a register of hieroglyphs, you wouldn't necessarily read in the order that it's written because the ancient Egyptians often wrote gods names and things like that first in a sentence even though they wouldn't have spoken it like that (it was out of honour to the gods). Besides, the whole structure of their sentences was completely different to how the English write, so often their sentences sound 'backwards' to us.

Check out the daily quiz on Hieroglyphs.net to see how their sentences were written; it's quite mind blowing.

In answer to your question, Egyptianscribe, I consider myself a beginner. I like to puzzle through translations and help people out where I can, but I must admit, I'm not terribly good at it.

Daughter_of_Seti the link you provided is awesome. I wish I would have had that when I had my hieroglyphics class.

I agree its not simple. You have to memorize many signs and also recognize that scribes made errors sometimes, which could alter meaning.

Hieroglyphics don't really have an alphabetic rendering. Sometime a single glyph can represent a person, place, or thing.
There is a hieroglyphic alphabet but it is not used to render all their text.

oh, well, im still learning, and the website i went on told me to do that.

I enjoy that website a lot, too. It's one of my favourites to explore when I've got any free time.


Learning hieroglyphs takes years and years of study, but people that learn them whilst they're still young (didn't I just read in another thread that you're only ten years old? I could be mistaken, but if you really are that young then that's amazing that you have an interest in glyphs at all ) probably find the art of mastering the ancient Egyptian language much easier.

yeah, im 10. i love egypt. whats wrong with trying to learn how to read and write heiroglyphics at my age???

I never meant to suggest that there was anything wrong with you learning hieroglyphs at your age, I just think it's such a cool thing for someone so young to learn to do. It's probably me being slightly envious in a way, as I didn't have any interest in ancient Egypt at all until I was in my twenties!

oh! then, never mind...