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 at a deeper, more meaningful level.
Your podcast host, Melinda Nelson-Hurst, Ph.D., is an Egyptologist with years of experience teaching at the university level, working in Egypt, and training students around the world to read real ancient Egyptian texts. She’s spent decades studying this 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.
With a blend of solo deep-dives and conversations with experts and everyday Egyptophiles, this podcast brings ancient Egyptian history, beliefs, and language to life — and shows you how learning hieroglyphs is possible, no matter your age, background, or schedule.
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.
Let’s hear the voices of the ancient world — together.
•Melinda Nelson-Hurst, Ph.D. (Voices of Ancient Egypt)
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
0:00
|
9:19
In this episode of Voices of Ancient Egypt, we pull back the curtain on the "highlight reel" of scholarship to reveal the messy, challenging, and often frustrating reality of deciphering ancient texts.
Have you ever felt like something was wrong because a particular hieroglyph, word, or passage seemed impossible? You aren't alone – even experts with decades of experience encounter simple texts that leave them stumped for hours.
Tune in to discover why the struggle isn't a sign of failure, but rather the exact place where deep learning and true expertise are born.
In this episode, you will learn: • The Secret Behind the Expert Facade: Why you never see scholars admit to being stumped in journal articles or public talks, and how this creates a misleading "highlight reel."
• Why Feeling "Stupid" is Your Greatest Asset: Discover why hitting a wall with a difficult text is actually a sign that you are undergoing the deep learning necessary to change your brain and build true fluency.
• The Science of the Struggle: Explore how research proves that mastery and depth are created through the process of working through difficulty, rather than coasting through easy material.
• Pro-Tips for When You’re Stuck: Learn the specific strategies experienced scribes use when a text doesn't make sense, from pursuing creative avenues to knowing exactly when to put a project down and return with "new eyes."
• A "Wake-Up Call" for Aspiring Scribes: A powerful reminder to "do it stupid" and "do it scared," because the path to becoming a scribe is paved with the very challenges you’re facing right now.
_________________________________________
Download my free guide, Half-Hour Hieroglyphs to get started with hieroglyphs now.
Learning hieroglyphs is a challenge if you don’t have a tried and true system to follow. This free guide will teach you how hieroglyphs work and how to use them to write names the way the ancient Egyptians did.
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 am really excited to bring this one to you today because this is definitely something a little bit different. And I know I probably say that a number of times, but it's true because we talk about a lot of different things here. And this is one I doubt you've heard anywhere else. And you might have gathered that from the title today. So here's what happened. In my program Master Scribes, recently one of my students brought a text to us in our private community, and she had a photo and was working on this short little bit. Okay, it's a photograph of an artifact just with this tiny little bit of text on it, really not much. Looked really simple. And this is, by the way, one of the amazing things about my program Master Scribes is that it not only includes the curriculum that I have created that helps you learn to read the next level texts from ancient Egypt, but also has the support to pursue your own interests and come ask questions too. So this happens all the time where my students work on things independently, or sometimes they work with a couple other people in Master Scribes together, and then they ask questions from me, like either when they've finished it and they want to check it, or if they've got a spot where they're stuck, or something like that. So that's what happened here. So in this case, it was really a very short text, looked very simple at first glance. But the final word or two on this proved to be very challenging. The beginning was fine. I looked at it and I was like, oh yeah, this is this, right? But this was not something any of us had ever seen before, including me. And it wasn't showing up in the dictionaries, this last little bit. I was spending hours on this, this one little snippet, right? And felt like I was getting nowhere. I was looking for parallels on other objects, reading scholarly articles, consulting massive dictionaries, and for a while wasn't getting me anywhere, right? And I wanted to share this experience because I think that sometimes when we're learning, if something gets really hard, we feel like, and we feel like we're not getting something. Maybe we even feel stupid. We often think that that means that we can't do it or we're not cut out for this. But here's the thing: I'm an expert in the field and have been doing this for 25 years. And you know what? I feel stupid all the time. And I am not the only one. It happens to all of us. But of course, you're not going to read that in a journal article or hear it in a public talk from a scholar either. It's like the general adage that you'll hear these days about social media, right? Social media is a highlight reel, only showing the best stuff, not the struggles, not the less flattering moments, not all that behind the scenes, even if it is supposedly behind the scenes, it usually doesn't include any of those things, right? Um, this is a true behind-the-scenes uh episode here, because I'm sharing, I'm sharing the dirty parts here with you. But, you know, most of the time, even with a sort of everyday life behind the scenes stuff, nothing usually that's that negative, or not negative is not the right word for it, but you know what I mean? That's less flattering, maybe. And so you just don't hear about this. And so it's easy to compare yourself to what's essentially somebody else's highlight reel. And you know what? Scholarship and podcasting and YouTube videos and social media and everything like that is really all highlight reels, right? We're not publishing articles that, or at least I hope usually, because the standard is that you don't publish them half baked, right? So we're not publishing them saying, like, yeah, gee, I didn't figure this out yet. Um, usually you've got to at least exhaust all possibilities. Some things that we just don't have parallels for. And there are some words that we're still not certain about 100% what they mean, right? That happens. Um, but you want to do, of course, the most thorough job first before you say something like that. And so you're not going to see generally people talking about, you know, how hard something was, or that they weren't able to do it, or, you know, that they really struggled with this for a long time versed, that kind of thing. And another way you could put this too is don't compare yourself to somebody's highlight reel, or don't compare your beginning to somebody else's middle or advanced stage, right? Because the truth is that we all struggle when learning new things, and there are always so many new things to learn, right? In fact, that's one of the things I love about ancient Egypt and reading Egyptian texts, is that there's always so much more to learn, so much more to figure out and to unlock a greater understanding of the ancient Egyptians themselves. Now, if I had given up the first time or even the 50th time, I ran into something that felt as difficult as what I described earlier, I wouldn't be here talking to you as an expert with a PhD. I would have done something entirely different that was easier, right? I had to go through this so many times of feeling like I was totally lost, like I wasn't any good at this before I built up that expertise. And that's not to say that this is like the most difficult thing ever or it's horrible or anything like that. It's just to say that this is part of the process of deep learning. When you're gonna learn something that's really truly worthwhile and is going to teach you so much and change your brain in so many ways, it's not gonna be the easiest thing you've done, right? Because change and development doesn't come from easy. It comes from the struggle. I mentioned this actually at the end of the previous episode too. So if you haven't checked that one out, you'll you'll want to hear that one. And that's why I wanted to share this with you today, because I know that at least one of you out there right now is frustrated, feeling like you're just not getting it, and maybe even on the verge of giving up learning hieroglyphs, or maybe learning something else that you love as well, because of this. Because what if the truth is that when it's hard, that's where the learning is. And this isn't just me musing about this. Learning really does come from struggling. I talked about this in the last two episodes, actually, in the 50% rule episode, which was number 31, and then also in 32, my ask me anything episode, where I talked about this near the end on the final question. This is not my idea, by the way. This is something that has been proven in research repeatedly. It's the struggle that creates the learning, that over time creates the depth and fluency, and that eventually makes the expert. And this is what it's like to be a scribe. Sometimes answers don't come immediately. Sometimes they don't come easily, even if you're an experienced scribe. Sometimes we have to get creative and pursue all the avenues or even console other people, because we're constantly learning, constantly running into things that are completely new or just different enough to throw us for a loop. But we keep after it, we keep exploring, we keep studying. And this might mean putting something down for a while when progress hasn't been happening, and moving on to other things, before eventually coming back again and figuring it out now that you're looking at it with new eyes and with a brain that's at a new level of understanding. There are a seemingly endless number of Egyptian texts out there to read. So there will always be ones you haven't read, always be ones that I haven't read. There will always be ones where the quirks of a particular scribe or the writing traditions of a particular place in Egypt make it more difficult to figure something out. And that's exactly how we expand our abilities, our knowledge, and our understanding of ancient Egypt. So if you've thought about giving up on your journey to learn about ancient Egypt or to learn hieroglyphs, I hope that this is your wake-up call for you. This is the sign to keep going. Do it stupid, do it scared. Because that's what we do to become a scribe. Until next time, stay curious.
