Developments in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) made possible far wider interdisciplinary access to material for greater portions of the population than before. Learning hieroglyphics through a website looks much easier and faster than a book. The main benefit of creating an educational hieroglyphic website is to support teaching, learning, and research on the ancient Egyptian language. It is represented as an exemplar on how electronic projects became one of the very important tools in e-learning.
As an implementation step, we built an online dictionary in both Arabic and English. The idea was adopted due to the scarcity of electronic projects targeting Arabic speaking audiences. It is a long-term dictionary that is continuously enriched with words and other educational subjects. As a start, the website includes more than 5,000 words in the dictionary, which will increase with time.
Grammar lessons are competently prepared to suit all beginners, and they are arranged progressively according to use and order. These lessons focus on ancient Egyptian writing, which includes uniliteral, bilateral, and triliteral signs; arrangement and direction of ancient Egyptian writing; determinatives; phonetic complements; and the different ways of writing the same word.
The lessons shifted to how the ancient Egyptians wrote and used numbers, nouns, adjectives, demonstratives, and personal pronouns. It was also important to help beginners and amateurs to know about the titles used in ancient Egypt and the offering formula through the lessons given. All these lessons are accompanied with interactive quizzes to enable the user to examine their comprehension. These quizzes are set in two levels and are arranged by difficulty.
Selected topics related to ancient Egyptian civilization are also added on the website to give the reader complete information about ancient Egypt. The Rosetta Stone, and the story of its discovery, is one of the important topics in this section followed by the efforts of Arab scholars in deciphering the ancient Egyptian language. Names of ancient Egypt, royal names and titles, and Egyptian funerary gods are also among the selected topics.
The website is enriched with a practical guide for reading hieroglyphics: "Let's Read". This section helps the user to explore the images and identify the hieroglyphic signs easily until they can read the whole text alone. These images are accompanied with transliteration and translation of the texts.
It is worth mentioning that our website is a non-commercial project. Its aim is to spread knowledge in the world through educational hieroglyphic e-learning projects.
All material was peer reviewed and prepared by professors of Egyptology who used a number of important references:
- A. H. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar (Oxford,1973).
- J. P. Allen, Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs (Cambridge, 2010).
- M. Collier and B. Manley, How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs (London, 1998).
- R. O. Faulkner, A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian (Oxford, 1964).
- A. Erman and H. Grapow, Wörterbuch der aegyptischen Sprache (Berlin, 1971).
- P. Dickson, Dictionary of Middle Egyptian in Gardiner Code (California, 2006).
- O. El Daly, The Missing Millennium. Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings (London, 2005).
- عبد الحليم نور الدين، اللغة المصرية القديمة (القاهرة، 1998)
- عبد المحسن بكير، قواعد اللغة المصرية القديمة في عصرها الذهبي (القاهرة، 1982)
- برناديت موني، المعجم الوجيز في اللغة المصرية بالخط الهيروغليفي، ترجمة ماهر جويجاتي (القاهرة، 1999)