SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Voices of Ancient Egypt, the podcast for people who don't just want to learn about ancient Egypt, but want to understand it on a deeper, more meaningful level. I'm Melinda Nelsonhurst, an Egyptologist with a PhD in the field and years of experience teaching at the university level, working in Egypt, and training students around the world to read real ancient Egyptian texts. I've spent decades studying the civilization in a traditional academic setting so you don't have to. And so you can access knowledge that's usually locked behind academic walls. This podcast brings ancient Egyptian history, beliefs, and language to life and shows you that learning hieroglyphs is possible no matter your age, background, or schedule. So whether you want to read hieroglyphs in museums, on social media, or on your next trip to Egypt, you'll find the tools, stories, and encouragement to make it real right here. Let's hear the voices of the ancient world together. Hello, hello, welcome back, Egyptians. I am so excited to share this episode with you today. This is a bit of a sort of behind the scenes in my experience teaching and in my own mind to some extent too, having just at the time I'm recording this wrapped up around of my next level program Master Scribes and about to start the next one. I was thinking about my teaching and what I've learned over the years, what my students have taught me. And one story in particular really stood out. This is something I've learned actually from a number of students, but one story related to this particularly stands out. And certainly when I started teaching hieroglyphs, I thought I'd be the one doing all the teaching, right? But having worked with egyptophiles from around the world now and tons of people, it's taught me that the learning is always a two-way street. And that's why today I want to share with you a really key lesson that my students have taught me and how it's completely changed how I see hieroglyphs and learning them and how to teach them as well. So earlier on in my teaching years, I had been teaching hieroglyphs. I was not totally new to this, but I hadn't worked out the current strategies and curriculum that I use today in my programs. And I had had my own experiences as a student that I knew were not great. And pretty much all my colleagues who were graduate students at the time felt pretty much the same way as you. But I was still feeling out like, okay, but then what do you do that's different from that? And I had found some wonderful things that I had changed and were working great. So I was working with a small number of students at this time, and I had a student who was doing just absolutely great. He was killing it. We'll call him Darren. And he was picking things up quickly. He was reading really common, the common text that you see in museums, and he was seeing things on Instagram and other places and reading them. And he was so excited, fulfilling this childhood dream that he'd always had of reading hieroglyphs. And he got to the point where he felt so good about this, so confident, and he was doing so well. He really wanted to tackle a longer text in hieroglyphs. So he's like, I really want to do a piece of literature. I want to read a long, like literary story. And so I said, okay, sure, let's start with this piece of this story called The Shipwreck Sailor, which among Egyptologists, you'll hear Egyptologists say it is the easiest piece. But I will say, um, a little spoiler here, not the easiest thing to read, perhaps easy compared to some of the even more complex literature, but still not easy. So we gave it a go and we started reading together this part of the shipwreck sailor. And Darren quickly became really frustrated and disengaged, and he was just stuck in the minutia of the story, like its vocabulary, it's grammar. There was like too many, there were just so many new things, so many words he hadn't seen before. He was like a total grammar nerd too, with a linguistics degree and stuff like that. And even with that, like felt overwhelmed by the grammar of this section of the story that we were looking at. And I remember just looking at him, seeing this happen, and seeing that sort of spark that he'd had in his eyes, because he was so excited before, just stop and go away. And I was like, oh crap, what did we do? And luckily, it was this is not the end of the story. We realized, okay, this is not the time for this. Let's go back to the track we were on and continue making progress there. So we switched back to the kinds of texts that you're actually going to see in museums and on trips. So this is the kind of stuff that you are probably used to seeing, although you may not even know the names of them, like stele, which are these objects that look kind of like a modern tombstone, although they're a little bit different from ancient Egypt, and statues, tomb walls, temple walls, figurines, things like that. And he'd already been working on some of these and making wonderful progress. And so we switched back to that, progressing with what he was learning on those and practicing regularly with those. And he started making tons of progress again, reading more and more of these ancient texts, including, he said, the ones that he was seeing on social media. He said, like every day now he was recognizing hieroglyphs on Instagram, which was his platform of choice. And he would just, that spark came back. And I remember seeing him light up again and just keep making progress. So this solidified for me something that I had personally experienced myself. But until Darren showed me this through his experience that I could observe as an outsider, I never could quite put my finger on. So as a graduate student, I went through the traditional method of teaching an Egyptology, which most Egyptologists, this is how they were trained. And my fellow students have told me since that they also had the same experience. I did, nobody wanted to admit it when we were in class that we were struggling. But once we were older, a little wiser, and a lot more confident, we opened up about the fact that actually we all were struggling. So the traditional method, just in a nutshell, is essentially to go through a grammar book, a thick textbook about the grammar of a stage of Middle Egyptian, a stage of Egyptian that's called Middle Egyptian, rather. And only after going through that whole book and basically trying to internalize all the nitty-gritty grammar and syntax and everything, and doing little exercises and stuff, then you start reading Egyptian texts. But guess what the first text is that you usually read after that? The shipwrecked sailor. Yep. And I mean, some people start with a different piece of literature sometimes, but it's very common to start with literature and oftentimes the shipwreck sailor, because it is considered, at least among the literary texts, an easier one. However, what happened to Darren is exactly what happened to me. I mean, well, it honestly, it had already happened from the textbook, but it just continued when trying to go through the piece of literature. I went into Egyptology. Of course I went into Egyptology because I loved it. I had a passion for it. This is why I wanted to get a PhD in it. But when I actually got to the language classes, like the spark, that excitement, the progress, everything just drained out of me from that process because I just felt so stuck in the my new show, so disconnected from ancient Egyptians, from why I loved ancient Egypt, all of those things. So this is one of the things that I uh other students have taught me this from their experiences and ways that they tried to learn before from one of these traditional books or a course they took before they came to me, for example. But Darren's example is really the one that was the first one that kind of made it click for me to realize what was going on here. And that's when I understood just how important it was to start and continue with the right kind of ancient Egyptian text and progress just one step at a time, not leaping past, you know, 10 steps or something, which is more like the traditional method and what we tried to do there for that moment that we I just fell on our faces with. Um, and I realized from that that I understood that building this knowledge and not just the knowledge though, but the confidence that you build when you work on the appropriate things makes so much difference. And Darren had had so much confidence from the text we had been reading, the right, the right, what I would say is the right stuff, really. And then we, when we tried to do something that was 10 or really honestly, maybe 20 steps ahead, that's when he got that confidence, confidence was temporarily dashed. And it made him feel really disconnected from why he loved this stuff, why he loved ancient Egypt and why he wanted to learn this, right? And once we switched back, then he was able to connect with the ancient Egyptians again, that their real words. It was something he could really see and understand and accomplish, because these were texts that gave him tremendous insight into ancient Egyptians and their thought, but also were a reasonable chunk of things to learn at that time, right? Not a like a massive tome that you're trying to ingest. If you could imagine, if you're trying to learn English and, you know, a teacher gives you Shakespeare and they're like, here you go, try and read it. Yeah, it's probably not gonna go so well, right? So, or you know, you you could think of things that are probably, you know, just as hard or worse, or you know, uh a Charles Dickens novel, right? And it's like, here, this is what this is how you're gonna learn English is from this. So it was through that experience, though, with Darren that it really made me grasp this, even though I had personally experienced it myself, it's very hard to see things in yourself and pinpoint like what exactly was the problem and what is the replacement for it? How do we solve this problem? So that's how I really learned this. Is when I totally changed how I was doing things and I firmly committed to the way that I create curriculum now. And that is because when we connect with the ancient Egyptians and we really understand them on a deeper level, when we read the text that they actually wrote, this makes all the difference. And literature, of course, they wrote that too, but it doesn't feel like you're reading their real words when you try to jump into that too soon. This isn't to say you can't read literature. I have students now in my program, Master Scribes, who are reading the Shipwreck Sailor and they're loving it, right? But that's because they're doing it at a later stage in their journey. They're not doing this near the beginning. There's an appropriate time and place for any Egyptian text. So it's just important, like I said, to have that appropriate time and place along your journey for it. And reading from the original is so important. One of the things that can happen with literature and some texts too is that you're reading from typeset versions of it and examples, and it feels very divorced from the original. So this is why in my programs we work almost entirely and exclusively from photographs of the real artifacts with texts on them. And these are the, you know, so much more exciting and connect you to the ancient in ways that just the typeset examples in books don't. And this connection creates that excitement and that confidence, which allows us to keep going and keep getting better at hieroglyphs. So when you so if you've run into this problem before and maybe you you felt like this was broken, or maybe you thought something was wrong with you that you weren't getting it or stuff because you tried to work on something too complex, or you took a class or used a book that where things were just too complex, especially when you were in the beginner stages and you end up feeling like it's just a slog. You don't have that excitement for it, connection, and zaps your confidence. Maybe you feel like I just can't do this, to realize this is not you. This is the approach that's the problem. It's just like Darren was wonderful. He's done amazing things since then, too. He's reading so much. The problem was not Darren. The problem was trying to work on something that was really just totally inappropriate for where he was at the time. And it's crucial that we keep that connection, that excitement, and our confidence alive through using that step-by-step kind of method that I've developed now in our learning and working on the original text step by step one and on, not skipping ahead a whole bunch and saying, like, oh yeah, we're just like gonna jump into this thing and we'll just look up a million words and we'll see how it goes, right? So if you've ever had this experience like Darren had or like I had in graduate school, and you got lost in the minutiae and confused and lost that connection, this is totally normal. And honestly, learning itself is a learning experience. So when you feel this situation coming on, I recommend you simply take a step back and ask, how can I break this down? So I'm taking just one step right now. How can I keep this connection to the real ancient people? This will help you strip away the extra stuff, the jargon, strip away trying to step, you know, too far ahead. You might look at it and be like, oh, it's because I'm trying to, you know, skip ahead to these things rather than take just this next small step. This is how when you do this and you course correct and you take those small steps. This is how you do what my students have been doing. And to quote my student Mariana, this is how you go from struggling to having hieroglyphs open up for you like a lotus flower. And this is how you keep that dialogue going between you and the past, between you and the ancient Egyptians and really getting to know them so much better. And if this is the kind of insight that excites you, stay tuned because my foundational program for learning hieroglyphs, which is called Scribal School, will be opening soon. And it's where we start our journey with hieroglyphs here from the very beginning, taking those very intentional step after step that builds on your knowledge and it builds up your confidence and your skills at the same time. So you can go and read those texts in museums, on trips, or on Instagram like Darren did. You'll want to grab your spot on the wait list at scribalschool.com so you won't miss when enrollment opens. And until next time, keep your curiosity alive.