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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, and welcome back to the Voices of Ancient Egypt podcast. I'm excited to be with you here today to bring you a very special episode. It's something I've never done before, where I am taking your question, sort of an Ask Me Anything style episode. And I got some great questions that came in. I'm going to focus on four great ones that I got. And I'm not sure if I'll do this type of episode again, but if you'd like me to do that again, you enjoy this, please do let me know by either replying to one of my emails if you're on my email list or sending me a DM on Instagram or Facebook. You can find me there as Voices of Ancient Egypt. So our first question comes from Jen. And she asked, Do Egyptologists working on archaeological digs believe in curses, like the one they say that Carter's team got after Tut's tomb? And have any unexplained events happened while on a dig? I think she means me personally, if I've experienced that. And since the ancient Egyptians believed in magic, I was wondering if the majority of Egyptologists do too. So I love this question because it really strikes at the heart of something you've probably heard and seen in pop culture a lot, which is the idea of ancient Egyptian curses. Now, before getting into what Egyptologists believe, I want to talk first a bit about what ancient Egyptians actually believed. Like, did they actually have curses? Did they believe in them? And so on and so forth, because this is something that comes up a lot. It's actually a topic I've taught on before in my university courses because I do think it's one that fascinates people so much, but also there's a ton of misinformation about as well. So the short answer to did they believe in curses in ancient Egypt is sort of, but maybe not in the way you think. So what I mean by that is that, well, yes, they did believe that people who had died could do things to them or otherwise interfere in their lives. And for more on that, you'll want to see episode 30 that came out recently that's all about the ancient Egyptians in their own words, and where we read a couple of letters that people wrote to their dead family members there. So you'll want to check that out for more on that topic. But there were no actual curses written in tombs like those supposedly written in Tutankhamun's tomb. So I say supposedly because there isn't really one in there. And the story of how this happened, why everybody thinks there was like some curse on Tuten Common's tomb, really has to do with financial interests. It's all to do with money. And that's because Lord Carnarvon, who funded the excavations, funded searching for Tutankhamun's tomb for multiple years, and then had to fund the actual excavation of the tomb, which ended up being a lot of work. He spent many years doing that. Howard Carter, of course, was the head archaeologist working for him doing that. And so when this became a huge sensation, he decided that he was going to use this to help recoup some of the costs that he'd put into the project over time. So he sold the exclusive rights to the story of the tomb's excavation to the Times of London. Now, this was a good deal both for him and for the Times, but for all of the other newspapers and the reporters who worked for them, this was not good news for them. They were quite upset about this because they could only print now old news, secondhand information that had already appeared in the Times. And by the time it came out in their papers, it was old news. They couldn't break any new stories. So the solution that many reporters found was to fabricate stories or find a so-called expert who would fabricate something for them, or who were desperate enough for attention that they fabricated it and maybe the reporter didn't actually know. But this includes the story of the supposed curse that was said to, you know, have death comes on swift wings to anybody who enters the tomb. This was one of the reports in one of the newspapers. There is no such text written on anything from Tun Kamun's tomb. In fact, there are no curses or threats or anything of any kind in his tomb, and generally speaking, not in royal tombs at all, which might not be what you expect because of what you see in movies and hear about and uh different sources and stuff like that, but really there are none in there. And of course, the whole rumors about the curse were fueled by the fact that Lord Carnarvon did die during excavation of the tomb. It was many months after they first discovered it. But it's important to point out that Conarvin, the whole reason he got interested in archaeology in Egypt, is because he spent his winters there for his health. So he was from an aristocratic family, of course, as you might have picked out from his name, and um, well, he actually didn't have a whole lot of money himself. He married money uh to keep his family afloat, and so he could afford to go to Egypt in the winters, and his doctor recommended it for his health because he had a lot of health issues. He was kind of maybe frail would be a little extreme, but he was not in very good health. So it's not really that surprising that he could die fairly easily from an infection, which is what happened. Keep in mind this is the 1920s, no antibiotics to save you. So he cut himself while shaving, seems to have had probably a mosquito bite that he cut while he was shaving. Of course, straight razors back then also so much more likely to cut yourself, and it got infected, and he died from that. This was not an uncommon occurrence at that time, especially if you were uh very young, although you're not shaving, of course, if you're very young, but some other kind of infection. Or if you were on the older side, like Lord Carnarvon, and or had health issues like he did. So no real evidence for any curse on the tomb, other than people conjecturing because of that, and then fabricating texts that supposedly were on different objects in the tomb, but actually are not. So, what we do have though are some threats. You might want to call them threats rather than curses. You could call them curses, but once I tell you what these sound like, you might not be so inclined to think of them that way. Um, do occur in some non-royal tombs. So when I say a non-royal tomb, I mean a tomb that belonged to somebody who's not in the royal family. You know, they're not a king, queen, prince, princess, etc., right? Or they might end up being like really extended family, and we so extended we don't even know they're related to the king. But in any case, they're not part of the sort of very highest group, you know, of royals there. So in Egyptology, we make a distinction because these two types of tombs are treated very differently in terms of how they're constructed and what kind of decoration they have in them. There they're actually a lot of differences. So we talk about royal tombs kind of in a certain category, and they're different in different time periods, of course, too. And then we talk about non-royal tombs in another one. However, in this case, when I'm talking about non-royal tombs, I'm not talking about every burial ever, but just the really wealthy ones who actually had things that they could write on, right? So most people were buried actually just in a pit in the sand and didn't even have a coffin, much less any kind of like stone tomb chamber or anything like that that you might be used to seeing in photographs because it's really the good-looking stuff, the fancier stuff that has um more colors and objects and texts and stuff that make it into TV, books, movies, etc. So these tombs that I'm talking about are actually of the smaller number of non-royals who could afford those fancy things. So you might call them elites. That's what we tend to say in Egyptology. So essentially the people who are at like the very top of society, but below the actual royalty. So they did have things sometimes in their tombs. This is not in every tomb of the sort, even of the wealthy people, it's still a fairly small number. But some of them do have what you could call threats. But they are a lot tamer than anything you're gonna see in a movie or in hyped up stories. Some of them get slightly more exciting, uh, but most of them basically go like this. They say, As for anyone who shall remove stones from my tomb, I will be judged with him before the great God. The great God being referred to here is Osiris, the judge of the dead. So, in other words, what this is saying is if you actually harm the tomb in some way, sometimes they refer to removing the name, taking stones, or otherwise damaging it, or taking and reusing parts, then the deceased person will take you to court in the afterlife, and Osiris will judge the case. Definitely not the kind of thing you're gonna hear in a movie, right? Um, really not so exciting as the kinds of stuff that made headlines with Dutin Khamun or that show up in movies and outlandish stories that you'll read all over the internet and other places, right? So that brings me back to Egyptologist today, considering what we know about this idea of threats and, you know, entering tombs and so forth. This is also something I would recommend you go back and listen to my episode on tombs. That's episode 15 called These Two Things Will Forever Change How You Look at Egyptian Tombs. And there I go into a lot of these details about the different parts of the tomb and how they functioned. But the gist of it is that parts of tombs were intended to be private, and other parts of tombs were not intended to be private, and it's actually not a problem to enter them at all by any ancient Egyptian standard. So with Egyptologists today, I would say I certainly cannot speak for everyone in my field. However, my personal experience has been I have not experienced any kind of things that I would consider sort of spooky or strange. I have worked mostly in house settings, domestic settings, rather than within tombs, but I have certainly gone inside my share of tombs as I visited different sites around Egypt and never had any kind of negative experience related to any of those. I mean, unless you want to count things like, you know, having to deal with bats and stuff like that. I guess that's a little creepy sometimes. Uh, especially, you know, some tombs I got permission to go into and photograph. Um, they weren't open to tourists, and so they were homes for bats. And that meant the floor was filled with uh quite a deep layer of bat droppings. And bat guano, if you know anything about that, um, not the safest thing to be around. So that was a little uh slightly scary, I guess you could say, just for the disease factor with that. Um, and certainly a bit off-putting, you know, uh, bat pea smells really bad, actually. Um, but nothing supernatural. Uh, and I can't speak for everybody else, but I don't know anybody who's ever mentioned to me anything like that happening. None of my colleagues or friends have told me that they were concerned about curses or any of those kinds of things. However, I would say what does concern me and many others in my field is treating ancient and also modern Egyptians with respect, as well as following proper protocols of archaeology and the rules and laws of Egypt when it comes to working with cultural heritage there. And this means not working hastily to remove artifacts like was done in the past, which often caused a lot of damage. So, I mean, archaeology itself is inherently destructive because when you remove layers of sand or soil or anything else, for example, you can never put that back exactly the way it was. So excavations always need to be properly planned, approved, and documented every step of the way. Because what's happened in the past a lot of times, uh, before we had these kinds of standards, is that, you know, basically it was a little closer to treasure hunting where people were just digging pits and pulling things out. And while you can get some information from the individual objects, you lose a ton by not documenting everything else around it and being more careful with taking the layers down one at a time. And doing this in a more modern, proper, careful way has a couple of advantages. Uh, first of all, it does respect the cultural heritage and prevents this sort of wanton and unnecessary damage to places like tombs. And it prevents the loss of information, like I was just talking about, which can happen, and it happened a lot in the past, but it can still happen if people aren't careful and or they aren't documenting as they go. So it's not just about, you know, not being slash stab about it, but also you have to be writing down, taking photographs, drawing, etc., like everything as it happens, which is why archaeology, by modern standards, is very slow because we have to do all of that documentation and make sure we're doing everything properly. And the reason to do this is because everything from a small fragment of mud brick to royal inscriptions deserves the same respect and care. And that brings me to another question we had, speaking of royal inscriptions. So Itziar, I'm not sure if you're pronouncing your name properly, but I hope so, um, asked me regarding the honorific transposition. I've always wondered how it became known that they weren't reading it in the order it was written. So, first let me back up a little bit and explain what it is that Itzziar is referring to. There's a concept in ancient Egyptian writing that Egyptologists call honorific transposition. That's what they are asking about, which is really just a fancy way of saying that the ancient Egyptians sometimes put words in writing in an order that's technically wrong and not how they would have actually said it when they were speaking. And the reason for this in the writing, but not in speech, is that they moved kings and gods to the front of a phrase or sentence as a sign of respect. So that's where the honorific part comes in honorific transposition. Transposition meaning removing the position of the different words. So what this person was asking is how do we know that that's what's going on? Like, how do we ever figure out that these things are in the wrong position? And how do we know that this differs from everyday speech? And so on and so forth. So, how do we figure it out? And how do we know how it would have been originally? So there's a couple of different things that have allowed us to figure this out and further confirmed it. So, first is that once Egyptian was understood well enough to get a good sense of the structure of the language, the grammar and the syntax, syntax meaning the word order. And what helped with this was a lot of things, but especially the final stage of Egyptian Coptic, which never died out completely. It's still used in the Egyptian Christian church today. Egyptologists could sort of reconstruct the structure of the language and then realize that what the usual word order was, and that there were these certain cases that defied the usual word order, and that those cases always involved mentioning a king or a god. So this is part of how it was figured out. But secondly, this is also confirmed by outside sources. So, for example, Ramses II, often called Ramses the Great, his throne and birth names. So kings had five names, but two of them, the throne name and the birth name, are the ones that appear in cartouches. They're the ones you see really most often on monuments. These two names were also written in cuneiform documents because of diplomacy between uh Egypt and other areas around Anatolia and the Near East. And so since cuneiform is a syllabic script, that means it has full syllables, including vowels. This is very unlike Egyptian. So Egyptian, we don't have vowels, and we're reconstructing where vowel placement was, and we have a modern convention of how we pronounce things that isn't really meant to portray how the ancient Egyptians pronounced it, but it's simply for scholarly convenience, so we can talk to each other about the language and about these words and actually be able to pronounce them somehow, because if you had just the consonants, we'd be just like spelling and it would sound like alphabet soup all the time. And it would be very hard to understand what we were talking about. So we have a conventional way that we say these things, but then we also know from linguistic research, as well as comparing two texts like the one I'm going to talk about here with Ramsay's name, that um there were actually a quite a difference in where the vowels laid. But not just that, in these cuneiform texts, we can see that the name of the gods in these names that belong to Ramsey's. So a lot of names have the name of gods within those names, including Ramsey's throne name and birth name. And we can see that they actually occur in a different place in cuneiform than they do in the hieroglyphs, and that this is because of the way that in hieroglyphs you have that honorific transposition where they're moving the names of the gods around. So, in for example, in Egyptian, in our modern standardized way of saying it, we would say his birth name as Ramas Su, and then with this little epithet on the end of Meri Amun, meaning beloved of Amun. But in the hieroglyphs, the god Amun in that beloved of Amun part and with the beloved are actually put up at the beginning of the cartouche at the front, right? So this is put up at the front, but we understand this to be actually something that would follow the main part of the name, the Ramasu part, which is what we render as Ramses when we're usually speaking in English. Now in Cunea form, this name shows up as Ria Mas Isa for the Ramasu part, and then Mai Amana for the Mari Amun part. So one thing you'll notice with this is not only are our vowels moved around, but if you have an R at the end of something, like in Mare or Mary, the R is dropped. This was a regular thing that we know about of pronunciation in the New Kingdom, and later, same thing happens with T's as well. So you'll see that in his other name. So that's why you have Mai or Mai, not Mary, and then Amana for Amun. And we can see that the way they're writing it out in Kunya form is that their version of Ramasu is coming first, just like we render it as Egyptologists now, although obviously with a little different pronunciation. And then the epithet beloved of Amun, Mary Amun, is coming after that, with Amun at the very end, the way we say it now in transliteration and also in our modern languages when we say it. So that confirms that idea right there and gives you a great example. But you can also see this actually in his throne name as well. So Ramsey's throne name, the way that we would render this today with our standardized way of doing it is Usur Maat Re. That's the main part of his throne name. And then we have this additional sort of epithet-like second part of the name, which is Setep En Re. And then in both of these, you'll notice I say Usur Maat Re, but in the hieroglyphs, the Rey comes first, the sun god Re. And then in Setep En Re, same thing. I'm saying it setep en re because again, with both of these, we understand grammatically that re needs to come at the end, but in the hieroglyphic writing, re is actually before the setep uh here. So, but in the cuneiform, this is confirmed again because we have was mua ria for usurmaat re. So again, they're dropping the T, a little bit of a difference with the W sound than what I'm saying, but Ria is the same as we had before for Re. And then we have for Setep and Rei, we have Satip Na Ria. So again, Re or Ria in the cuneiform is coming at the end, just like we would also figure out from the grammar that makes sense for these names. Because these names were actually. Full phrases, sometimes full sentences. So this shifting of signs in writing was done because hieroglyphs were not just signs for sounds, but also had both aesthetic and religious significance too. Not for the most part because they wanted this to be like mysterious or something like that, although they do sometimes do make intentionally cryptic texts. But for the most part, this was because the nature of hieroglyphs and how they are pictures that you can actually recognize and identify, even though they did stand oftentimes for sounds, they have this greater aesthetic value to them of how the ancient Egyptians wanted them to appear, how they wanted them arranged, as well as being seen as sacred and a way to make things permanent. And so there were these certain conventions that they went by to sort of honor that sacred level of it and honor the gods and kings. And that brings me to Andrea's question about magic, since we are talking about the sacred here. And she asks, quote, modern discussions of ancient Egypt often emphasize magic and divination. From your perspective, how important were divinatory practices within Egyptian culture? And are they sometimes overstated in popular portrayals? So, first, let's talk about divination and whether the ancient Egyptians practiced it at all and in what ways. So, in fact, they actually did indeed, in a few different ways, practice divination. So, a lot of what we have attested comes from late in ancient Egyptian history, during what we call the Greco-Roman period. However, long before that, we do have texts for doing things like interpreting dreams as good or bad omens, as well as a lot of evidence for asking gods for oracular pronouncements in the form of yes or no questions. So we clearly have these earlier practices that were quite common that you could count under the category of divination. So, in the case of asking a god for an oracular pronouncement, uh, a person would ask the god a yes or no statue to the god statue, usually while it was out processing around during a festival, although they might send a message into a temple instead. And they would ask a yes or no question like, Will the house be given to her? They're often very cryptic like that, which is not very helpful for us, but it they figured they knew what they were talking about, the god knew what they were talking about, so they didn't need to put out all the details. And then the god statue would either sway forward for yes or backward for no. So these two are the most well attested and known for the pharaonic period of ancient Egypt, but they also had other ways of predicting things. So, for example, some texts from Darrell Medina. This is the town where the people who built the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings were living. They lived in what we now call Darrell Medina during the New Kingdom, and there we see a use of doing things like observing the weather, particularly thunder, to identify omens, and also even using oil and water to make predictions. So for the latter, what they did was pour water into a bowl and then pour some oil into the water and interpret the patterns that the oil formed on the water. Now, interestingly, some of the things you might tend to think of when it comes to predicting things or determining characteristics like astrology were actually relative latecomers in ancient Egypt. So astrology, for example, doesn't really come on the scene till around the Greco-Roman period. And this is likely due to influences from other areas like around the Near East and Persia, rather than being an indigenous practice. Now, all of that said, when it comes to the question of whether I think things about magic and divination are overstated in popular portrayals, I would still say yes. And that's not to say that the ancient Egyptians didn't have practices that we would label today as magic or divination, because they certainly did, but it's that they get quite distorted andor exaggerated in popular portrayals. So just to give one example, like the Book of the Dead actually raising somebody who's dead in the 1999 movie The Mummy, for example. That's just one example. There's many, but you know, this kind of thing shows up all over the place in popular TV shows and movies and, you know, just misconceptions that people talk about everywhere. Because for in this case, for example, the Book of the Dead, which was not actually called that in ancient times, by the way, was not used for anything of this sort and was rather much more like a manual for the dead and also for the priests to prepare a person to make the dangerous journey to the afterlife. Now, there were a lot of real practices that ancient Egyptians actually did do, such as making protective charms and amulets, or breaking pots or figurines with people's names on them to get them to stop causing trouble. Sometimes this is compared to a voodoo doll, but again, I think we're going a little too far into pop culture ideas there if we do that. Um these would likely fall in our modern Western idea of magic, right? These things required a force that the ancient Egyptians called Hekka to make them effective. And because of this, Hekah is also usually translated as magic. But here's the thing: these practices were no different than the things that the kings and priests did in ancient Egypt. That is the things that we will call religion, right? People don't usually go around referring to things that happened that in temples, officially done by priests and or sanctioned by the head of whatever religious body it is, in this case it is the Pharaoh, the king of ancient Egypt, as magic, right? They would refer to that as religion. And the thing is, the practices are identical. The only reason we might call them magic is because somebody unofficial is doing them, right? So they had state-level rituals to protect Egypt, for example, from enemies that were almost like identical to those local ones that I was talking about, where somebody might write the names on a figurine or on a pot and then smash it to protect themselves from people who were causing them harm, whether they might be spirits of dead people or even alive people. And the Egyptian government did the same thing to protect themselves from foreign enemies in, you know, basically for success in war and to prevent invasions and things like that. So what I'm getting at here is that these were not quote-unquote magical practices in the sense that they were separate from religion. And usually in modern times, at least in the West, when we talk about magic, it's basically to label certain practices as like an other, something that's different, that's not part of religion, right? Usually in a negative way is separate. And the ancient Egyptians would have made no such distinction. In fact, Hecah, which I talked about a moment ago as usually translated as magic, was a kind of creative force that was necessary to make creation happen in the first place. The world would not be here without Hecca, right? The gods, people, Egypt itself would not exist without Hecca. And it was understood by the ancient Egyptians that Hecah continued to exist for human use and protection. It's even mentioned in a text called the Instruction for King Marikaure, where he talks about that. He mentions that Hecah was given to people by the gods to ward off bad things that might happen. And it was understood that Hecca continued to exist like this so that anybody could tap into it. And this was not outside of religion. This was part of the larger religion that was just part of everyday life. In ancient times, they didn't distinguish between religion and the rest of your life, right? This just was. It's just how things were. Thus, it's part of this wider belief system and not this like other kind of category that we usually mean when we say magic in modern times. Now, learning to read the Egyptian texts that talk about these things can definitely be tricky at times, which is why an anonymous person sent me this question. They said, Melinda, I am 75 and wondering if it's my age. Because short of memorizing every symbol and diphthong, I don't know if I'll ever be able to do this without all of my vocab sheets for reference. They mean like learning to read hieroglyphs is what they're referencing here. Um, they say, I am starting to recognize certain groupings of hieroglyphs without having to look them up first. But mostly I'm recognizing that it is a known group that I would have on one of my sheets where I can look it up. And I, in other words, they're saying they don't already automatically know exactly what it says, but they can recognize that this is a group of signs that makes a word, for example. So they ask, will it ever get better? This is a great set of questions, Anonymous, whoever you are out there. And I have to say we have all been here before, and it is true that sometimes at certain stages of learning, it can take longer for different people, right? So we could just look at children acquiring language to see how this works so clearly. But that doesn't mean that we can't learn and that we're not going to make progress. Everyone who has learned Egyptian as an adult, which is just about all of us who've learned it, um, has been through the same stage that you describe. In fact, I'd say that what you describe shows you are making progress. You're now recognizing grouping of signs, right? And that shows that you're making progress. Because now you're seeing how these things fit together and make words, which is one of the most common questions I get all the time is like, how do I know where a word ends? And like, how do I know how these go together and so forth? You're recognizing these groupings and knowing that this is like, okay, this is like a word or a phrase that I can look up. And it's tempting to look at this as a glass half full, right? Because you're looking up the meaning for these things. But I think that it's important to look at where you started. What would the you of a few years ago or even maybe a couple months ago have thought about where you are now? I bet that old you would be so impressed and proud that you are recognizing these groups of signs, right? This is not something you could do before. That's a fact. And it's so important to celebrate these wins. We tend to set these huge goals, like I'm gonna learn how to read everything in hieroglyphs, right? And then hold off on celebrating until we reach that huge goal, no matter its size or complexity. But the research has actually shown that celebrating the smaller wins along the way to the big goal actually improves your progress to that big goal. It gets you results faster and better, and it helps you get there. So please, first thing to do is stop and look back and think about this and realize how far you've already come. All right, now that we've acknowledged your progress and how normal it is to have these feelings, also, this happens to everybody with feeling like, oh, I'm just not getting it. Now, to your question about will it get easier and how to be able to read these things more fluently. So, yes, it absolutely gets better with practice. You've already seen improvement, right? You're recognizing those groups. As you practice more over time and with a wider variety of things, these things that are a big struggle now will get easier and easier. Now, in terms of how to get there, it's about practice, but especially practicing from real words, phrases, and sentences, preferably from original Egyptian texts or at least photographs of them, rather than working on just like individual type signs in isolation or something like that. And there's there's good reasons for this in research. And you'll notice that a lot of times actually the more innovative and effective modern language programs that teach, they teach you things in chunks, right? They don't just teach you one letter at a time, they don't just teach you necessarily even one word at a time, they'll teach you like whole phrases at a time. And there's absolutely nothing wrong, by the way, with using sign lists, vocabulary lists, or a dictionary or whatever to look things up while you're working your way towards fluency. The only caveat I would put in there with that is that it is really helpful to work on whatever it is that you're working on and do as much as you can first before you look the things up. Give yourself some time to struggle with it. The reason for this is that research has shown, regardless of whether you remembered a word in the moment or not, and you had to look it up before you knew what it was. Either way, if you allowed yourself to struggle with it, you improved your recall in the future and deepened your learning. So it's so important to allow yourself to struggle with it first. It's counterintuitive because when we struggle, we think something's wrong. This isn't going right, right? But it's actually how we build fluency, it's how we build depth, it's how we build our knowledge, and this has been shown repeatedly in research. Finally, I would also say to not allow yourself to stay stuck on studying the same thing over and over. So I'm not sure how you're studying, whether you're um studying on your own with a book, or if you signed up for one of my programs or what, since you've submitted this anonymously. But if you're going through lessons, for example, I would not stay on the same one forever and ever just because you're not getting everything, right? And I was saying that if you've gotten at least about half of the lesson down, or if it's more, great. You're ready to move on to the next one. And then what you'll do is later you'll come back, you'll circle back to those earlier lessons, and you'll work through them again. And that is going to build your understanding at so much deeper of a level than if you just repeated the same thing over and over again without ever moving forward. And for more on how to do this and why it works, you should check out episode 31 on my 50% hieroglyphs rule. So for anyone who wants to learn hieroglyphs or honestly anything else you're learning, I highly recommend that episode. So check it out. It was right before this one. And thanks so much for everybody for your wonderful questions. I'd love to hear what resonated most with those of you who are listening here today and whether you'd like to hear more AMA episodes like this. If so, please reply to one of my emails or send me a DM on Instagram or Facebook. I'm voices of ancient Egypt over there. And let me know if you'd like to hear more AMAs like this in the future. Until next time, stay curious.