Middle Egyptian: A Student's Guide

Preface

This site grew out of teaching Middle Egyptian to university students.

Students who know a Semitic language such as Hebrew or Arabic approach Middle Egyptian with an illusory advantage. The script has no vowels, the root carries the meaning, pronouns attach as suffixes, there is a genitive construction and there is a nisba — and the resemblance tempts one to assume that Egyptian behaves like a Semitic language. It does not. Egyptian belongs to the Afro-Asiatic family but is not a Semitic language, and it has no close relative; it is precisely where it looks familiar that mistakes happen. The stative, for example, is historically related to the corresponding forms in other Afro-Asiatic languages, but its function and syntax differ from theirs; the sḏm=f forms are not verb stems, and the distinction between them is not a distinction of tense in the familiar sense.

Three difficulties come up again and again. The first is the script itself. A single sign may serve as a phonogram, a logogram or a determinative, and its function is determined by context alone; the signs are arranged in square groups rather than in a line of letters; there are no spaces between words and no punctuation. Before a sentence can be analyzed, one must decide exactly what is written in it.

The second is the relation between clauses. In English almost every syntactic relation is marked by a conjunction — “that,” “because,” “if,” “when”. In Middle Egyptian most relations are not marked at all: they arise from the form of the verb, from a preposition, or from the order of the clauses alone. The student looks for the conjunction, does not find it, and concludes that the sentence is broken.

The third is the dictionary. Dictionaries are arranged in transliteration order, but to transliterate a word one must already know how to read it — so the student is required to hold the script, the transliteration and the meaning in mind all at once.

This site is neither a grammar nor a dictionary. The grammars of the great scholars, among them Gardiner and Hoch, and Faulkner’s dictionary remain the basic tools, and this site does not replace them. It was written to stand beside them — to present the terms and structures in plain English, in the language the learner thinks in, and to offer an organized vocabulary that can be consulted quickly while reading a text.

The site has three parts. Part A presents the basic concepts of the hieroglyphic script and of grammar, from the signs of the script to the complex verb forms. Part B is a thematic glossary of common vocabulary, arranged by semantic field rather than in transliteration order. Part C contains lists of the common biliteral and triliteral signs and determinatives, and a bibliography.

The material rests first and foremost on my studies with Prof. Dan’el Kahn. The interpretations of words, terms and sentences draw on the work of scholars including Gardiner, Hoch, Selden, Allen and Faulkner; the sources are listed in the bibliography.

One technical note: throughout the site the hieroglyphs are displayed from left to right, even when the original was written in another direction. At times the writing has been altered from the original in order to make learning easier and to clarify the topic at hand.

Dr. Ohad Magori

University of Haifa, 2026