Welcome to U.C. Berkeley's Interactive Website for learning Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs!
This site was created especially for students taking Beginning Middle Egyptian (Egyptian 100A) at U.C. Berkeley, but anyone wishing to learn the basics of the ancient Egyptian writing system will also find it useful.
Egypt's pictorial writing system first appeared just before 3000 BCE, with the ancient language itself continuing to be spoken for another four millennia. During this vast amount of time, changes naturally occurred, leading scholars to divide the language into various phases. The most highly inflected, but also perhaps the most elegant, is Middle Egyptian. It continued to be used for monumental inscriptions long after it ceased to be the spoken idiom of the people. Even the wall reliefs of the last anci