Author Description

IMPORTANT: This is a draft book. The final version will be available in the late spring of 2013.Understanding Hieroglyphic Inscriptions is a self-study couse deisgned to help the student acquire a basic understanding the Hieroglyphic Inscriptions one is likely to encounter in one's visit to Egypt. There is a "rule of thumb", called the 80/20 rule, which says that in most endeavors 20% of the effort produces 80% of the results. From this we would expect that about 20% of hieroglyphic characters are used to produce 80% of the total hieroglyphic inscriptions and you should need to learn only bout 20% of the total possible vocabulary to be able to read 80% of all texts. We do not seek, however, to be able to understand every possible Hieroglyphic text. Our focus is on the monumental inscriptions, which form a rather small subset of the entire literature. The goal, then, will be to learn, or at least become familiar with, about 200 hieroglyphic signs and 400 words... the signs and words you are most likely to encounter on the walls of temples, on stela and in tombs. And to get the most from your learning we will, in general, learn them in the order of their frequency of use. That is, the signs and words you are most likely to encounter will be learned before those that are used less often.