Hieroglyphics Lesson 2 : Nouns + Worksheets

It's been a while since I posted the first Hieroglyphics lesson. However, as I promised, these lessons will continue, till we all have a good understanding of the ancient Egyptian language. But again, let me remind you that I am not an expert, I am just a Hieroglyphics learner like yourself. I was, however, surprised that the first lesson was viewed by 12,889 people by the time of writing this. I never thought it would be that big! Thank you for your trust :)

In this lesson, we will talk about nouns in Hieroglyphics. Specially their gender, something English native speakers aren't that familiar with.

As you probably know, a noun is the name of objects, places, things, food etc. Almost everything except for John and Peter, which are names. Just for the record.

"Leader", 'man" and "woman" are nouns.

In many (middle) eastern languages (almost all of them, I guess), nouns have a gender, like a table, chair, house, apartment etc, these nouns can either be treated as feminine or masculine. I already speak Hebrew and Arabic and it is the same case in these two (middle) eastern languages.

There are two genders in Hieroglyphics, masculine and feminine, best way to recognize the gender of a word is to look at the end of that word, most feminine nouns end up in a t sound, while a masculine nouns don't. Here are two examples:

The word in Hieroglyphics for "man" is "S" and for a woman is "ST"

These two nouns are very obvious, a man is always masculine and a woman is always feminine, just like boy, girl, mother, father etc. However, this principle can be applied to most Hieroglyphics nouns.

More examples? Here are a few examples from a book called The Premier, I found it very useful, here are a few examples of masculine and feminine nouns:

Ironically many of these genders are exactly the opposite today in modern Egypt. For example, in Egyptian Arabic, "water" and "obelisk" are feminine, while "thing" is masculine. Anyway, things change, don't they?

Now, how about some worksheets? I have designed this just for you, print it out and try to draw some hieroglyphs yourself.:

P.S. Click Download at the end of the snapshot to download the worksheet booklet and print it out (only 2 pages. More to come...)


Stick around for more lessons to come, I will try to make it a habit of writing one lesson a week. By the way, many are asking me what happened to the Egyptology reading courses. Unfortunately, a few book authors contacted me and expressed their anger that I broke the copyright laws, to be honest, they have the right to be angry, however, it was sad to see the reading courses stopping. Anyway, let's stick to our Hieroglyphics lessons for now.

If you missed the simple introductory Hieroglyphics lesson, you can check it out here. As I said, it was viewed by almost 13 thousand people!

Hieroglyphics Lesson 1: Introduction

Update: Hieroglyphics Lesson 2 is finally here. Nouns in Ancient Egyptian.

Hieroglyphs as you probably know are pictures used as signs for writing. Just like our alphabets today.


Egyptians have chosen pictures of object that related to their life and their nation... usually used forces of nature. Here are examples of some signs, so you have have an idea how they look.

Actually some of these signs represent what shape them. For example the picture of a mouth
means mouth! Pronounced “r”. (we'll talk about the stroke sign under the mouth later).

However, this case is rare. Most of what ancient Egyptians wrote, did not really mean the shape they are made of. But the signs rather convey sounds.


One more example:




Depicts a schematic house. So when we want to write the noun “house” we write it like this:



pronounced “pr”. Doh! The same stroke-sign again! We will discuss it later)


Interesting is that the same sound combination “pr” means ''to leave'' (a verb) but it is written in a different way (house, mouth and walking legs):






If we think of it literally (Picturally, if I could say) These signs would mean ''house mouth legs” which surely makes no sense. But rather actually the mouth part (as we already know it is pronounced “r”) is here to construct the whole “pr” sound. So there is no way we could take these signs and interpret them with the object they draw. However something else so interesting is the walking legs. They indicate some motion. Give us a hint that the word is describing some movement.


If you get confused with this, here an example that might help you understand:
The word “belief” in English consists of two sounds ''bee'' and ''leaf/leef''
What if we didn't have alphabets? How would we possibly write this word using pictures of everyday's life? Here is an answer, we would simply draw leaf next to a bee! This way:




Though the word belief has nothing to do with bees and leafs, a bee and a leaf succeeded to represent the typical sound of the word ''belief”. Makes sense? That's how ancient Egyptians did it!


And now here is what you might have been waiting for, a list of the common basic Hieroglyphs and the sound their represent:

Since nobody today really expects you to be drawing all these shapes to write down words or sentences, Egyptologists today have adopted transliteration of these pictures into written sounds, or rather into English alphabet.

Example? Ok instead of drawing the word house this way:

They simply write ''pr''. So they don't have to be drawing for long time, just grabbing a pen and writing two letters and the job would be done. However, of course this is not as charming as the original Hieroglyphs. But I think it is good to be aware of this transliteration (or Romanization if you would say, like they tried to alter the Japanese Hiragana/Katakana with Romaji/Romanized Japanese) , since most Egyptologists use it anyway, so we better get used to it.

One more reason is that you probably won't be able to write the proper symbols on your computer. So we probably better get used to the transliterated version of the language. However, I will do my best to create a simple system for the computer to be able to write Hieroglyphs just like it writes English.


Please do leave comments here and tell me how easy/hard this lesson was. 
Tomorrow (Sunday, I will post an exercise of few Hieroglyphics words and you will have to put the answers in the comments below!)