The main source of information has been my long study of Egyptology and the wish to understand what the people I was investigating were talking about in their own voices. I have to thank all the people who have gone before me in the work on hieroglyphs, starting with M. Champillon who was the first to decipher the language.
I personally have been studying hieroglyphs, the written language of the Ancient Egyptians, for about seven years now and have used the following resources to help me, this is a little list of books I keep trotting out in e-mails when people ask me where to find information, now I can just send them to this page!
The oldest of my books (published in 1926) and still the best – available from Amazon.co.uk and often to be seen in the British Library bookshop. it costs about £25, it’s a big thick book full of worked examples and practice exercises but I love it. It also has an English-Egyptian glossary (dictionary for us simpletons!) which is very useful indeed.
The modern British hieroglyph tutor (Published in 1999) – these chaps actually run summer courses in Liverpool using this text would you believe? I can’t get on with their methods but then that may just be my learning style, old fashioned like Gardiner, but my friends (yes Scarabs, Tina and Holly I’m talking about you!) who are also learning the language love this book. It has lots of worked examples and the nice thing about this is that if you are British you can go to the BM to see the pieces which the translations have come from.
James P.Allen - Middle Egyptian
Written by an American and the most up to date (Published in 2000). No so many worked examples but very good on English grammar which you need a grasp of to understand Egyptian grammar! Its true, I had to go and get a book on English grammar to help me understand what Gardiner was talking about when I first started.
