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 text. 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 bring you this episode today where I have a special guest. As you know, I always like to bring you the latest in what's working with learning hieroglyphs. And to do that, I bring on some of my top students. So I have one of my students, John, here with me today. And I can't wait for you to hear all about his journey with hieroglyphs. Welcome to the show, John.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

So um you've been in Master's Guides Wimpy for a few months now. And I'd love to start out first with you just giving us a little bit of information about you, just sort of, you know, who you are, what brought you to learning hieroglyphs.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Um okay, I'm John. Um I'm actually a lawyer by profession, uh, at least by by education. I um I do training and documentation for large corporations. So that's mainly what I do for a living. As far as uh hieroglyphs in in Egypt and things like that, that started right out of the cradle, I think. Uh they used to play the uh Universal Studios monster movies when I was a kid, Boris Karloff and the 1932 Universal Studios Mummy movie and the ones after it without him. Uh, and that made a big impression. I think so much so that my parents, I had to look this up recently, they bought me this it's called the Recovery of the Lost Mummy Adventure set. It was a G.I. Joe set that had a like a Dune buggy with like six wheels and a winch with a net, and it had a sarcophagus. And inside the sarcophagus, if you could open it, was a glow-in-the-dark mummy, and uh that sells for like a thousand dollars now. It was like seven dollars back in the day. And uh actually looking at close-ups of the pictures, it looks like there's real hieroglyphs on the mummy, uh, and on the on the sarcophagus. So I thought that was kind of funny, and and um, you know, so then I think a big uh step was my parents saw that I loved this. They um decided to go down to Chicago in 19 what, 77 when I was a kid still, and for the big uh King Tut exhibit at the Field Museum, and there was just you know a quarter mile long uh line outside of people waiting to get tickets. I I remember we had dropped my dad, you know, he dropped us off. We got in the back of the line, this huge line. He went to park the car. Somebody came to the back of the line, said they were getting a church group together because church groups got to buy tickets right away. So we joined this random group of people that became a church group, like the Moonies or something, and we we bought tickets, and even then we still had to wait until three in the afternoon to get to so I think a lot of people got turned away. I mean, yeah, and that um that was just a uh great, great experience. And uh then, you know, obviously Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, and that just pushed even further. And I went to the Yucatan with this archaeologist from the Milwaukee Public Museum, and then he had a trip to go into Egypt. So in 1989, uh I we drove almost the entire length of the Nile. I think we flew to Abu Simbal, uh, but we drove, we didn't take a boat like everybody else. We went to a lot of non-tourist towns, and um we even got stuck in New York City on the way there because of a huge snowstorm. We had a transfer from LaGuardia to uh JFK and we missed our plane on a Friday. So our next plane to Egypt was on a Sunday. So we got to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and tour the Egypt collection with all summer clothes in the middle of winter. And uh, I mean the highlight of that trip was we we I think we got there, you know, like at midnight or something, and and at four in the morning we were getting up and we walked over to the Great Pyramid and uh climbed it, uh, which is unusual, uh, because you don't really do that. But we ended up uh paying some guards at the bottom who would act as our guide and and was able to sit there watching the sunrise and the mosque call people to prayer and Cairo on one side and the desert on the other, and it kind of was actually raining. Uh and on the way down there were different guards, so we had to pay different people uh on the way down. Um, but at the top it's not flat, but it's uh there's carvings throughout history of Greek, Roman, you know, French, you know, English. And and people had spent a lot of time carving their names and dates and things at the top. And there's that little, I don't know if it's still there, but there was like a little lean to that showed you is like how tall it would have been uh out of wood, you know. Um and yeah, so that was just uh uh a wonderful trip. And I'm actually trying to plan another one to go back. And at some point I I decided, you know, wouldn't it be nice to learn something about hieroglyphs? So I um I I was taking, I think, Bob Breyer's Eat course on Egypt, that survey of Egyptian history, and he mentions that the Oriental Institute, which I think is the ISAC now, uh, they offered hieroglyphs by mail, which is really the only game in town if you wanted to learn this. This was like at least 15 or more years ago. I say that, but it's probably even longer than that. And it was like even old school then. And it it was literally you they gave you Oak's manual, which is impenetrable, and you really just taught yourself uh and mailed in your assignments, and there was no answer key. Okay, and I actually I think now I finally have an answer key now to that, but that was provided by a different instructor, but there was no answer key. So you mailed this back and waited for your next for the the red pen to get out corrected to mail it back to you. I mean, it you got a certificate and everything. It was really hard, and um so hard that I mean uh you know, I I just kept reminding myself that the Egyptians wanted to be understood. This was not encrypted information that they were trying to hide what they were saying, they were literally just trying to write out what they wanted to say, so I kind of had to keep reminding and just keep pushing forward because it was you're on a very tight schedule to move forward with that. It was uh it was tough. Um, and what made it so tough was I kind of blamed my public school education at first because somehow I didn't understand. I mean, I was an editor for the law review, uh, and I still didn't have a command of the English language enough to apparently understand the the words that they were using and the glamour that they were describing uh for hieroglyphs. And I come to realize uh 15 years later that that wasn't the real problem. The problem was I didn't know grammar for Arabic, Hebrew, and German. Um, and that was really kind of the problem that they were using terms from those languages, and no wonder I didn't learn that in grade school. Uh so so it's not blaming myself myself, I guess, at that point. And and um yeah, I mean I've taken a few hieroglyph different classes over time, uh but it, you know, um it it definitely uh I I think I stumbled upon your your course because I found your hieroglyph of uh of the day, you know, each of those videos. And I was watching those. I'm like, oh, you know, those kind of really resonate with me. And I found them very memorable. And I'm like, oh, you offer a course. Okay, that's kind of interesting. Okay, well, let's uh maybe I'll sign up for it. What's the worst that can happen? Uh, you know, uh I'll learn something and and maybe it'll be more memorable and taught in a little bit different way. And uh that turned out to be very true.

SPEAKER_00 8:57

Wonderful. Your journey reminds me definitely of many others in terms of the, you know, the the museum visit and uh amazingly your visit to Egypt as well, uh really sparking that lifelong passion and that desire to understand what's actually written on the things that you're seeing, right, in museums or or when you go to Egypt. And you've you've been with me now in Master Scribes for a few months and been making a lot of progress with hieroglyphs. Like you said, you had some background already. Um, but I'd love you to rewind the tape to sort of back to where you're just talking about a minute ago, where you decided to join Master Scribes and talk a little bit about like, you know, what problems were you maybe having with hieroglyphs that you were looking to solve, or what were you hoping to sort of get out of joining Master Scribes?

SPEAKER_01 9:46

Well, my my goals have always been very simple. I want to just walk into a museum and and I see different stella or tombs or you know, walls, or co you know, coffins. And I just kind of want to be able to understand what's being said there. I mean, that what what are they saying? What are they communicating? Uh and and read that. That's not a uh I guess that's a huge ask in some ways, but it's it shouldn't be, I don't know, maybe it's not. Um and uh none of the classes that I have taken um helped me really do that, which is kind of strange, right? Uh and and it wasn't until I listened to a few of your podcasts and took the scribal school first, okay, as sort of a prerequisite to master scribes, and and finally figured out quite kind of why, where those other classes sort of failed me in some ways. I mean, I don't say that, but these classes were the classes I've been have been taking, and a lot of the books are taught like you'd be learning French or German or some other language. You learn grammar, you learn more vocabulary, you keep adding grammar, you keep adding vocabulary, and your goal is to be able to read books and texts um in those languages and and and converse in those languages and things like that. And there's nothing wrong with that method. That is the standard way you learn a language. But it turned out when we went into museums, the stuff that you know you're seeing on the walls of tombs, on on coffins and stela are not war and peace. They're not a novel in in Egyptian. Okay, there are there are, right? Uh, but but they're not. Uh and they're more I I guess I use the analogy that they're more like a menu, uh, reading a menu in a restaurant. Uh asking you to learn in in some other language to read a menu in a restaurant is a much easier, more finite task because the word the vocabulary is less, the amount of grammar that you need is much, much less. Um and and and it's but that's what's in museums. It's not it's not the text of a novel like Shipwreck Sailor or something like that, um, on the walls. It's it's more formalaic, um, and it's more repetitive, and it can be learned with a lot less effort as far as learning uh grammar and vocabulary and things like that. And and I I think I I I posted my experience on the chat board in the class uh about going to the museum recently. I've been to the Metropolitan Museum over a hundred times, at least. I mean, I go there four or five times a year. We were just there for my wife and I for the Raphael exhibit. Excellent. Definitely recommend it. But we also took, I wanted to go over to the Egyptian collection, which I've been, again, at least, you know, 75 times, walked through there. I've given people tours of it. I know I like the back of my hand. Um, I know how it's set up chronologically in Old Kingdom all the way to Ptolemaic, you know, in a big U shape. And I know where the King Tot stuff is in there from, you know, is great. I know the whole place. And but it was uh it was like I had walked in there and never been in there before because now um I mean it started in the in the the the lobby uh of the uh Metropolitan Museum, which is just it was a zoo. I mean, it's just wall-to-wall people. I'm standing in front of the statue of Ramses II, and I'm kind of just trying to read some of the hieroglyphs along the base, which is his name and you know, live forever and all that sort of stuff, and um, you know, like Ra and and stuff like that. But this woman comes up to me and she doesn't come up to me. She actually was standing shoulder to shoulder with me. She's not talking to me, she's with her husband and child, and she's pointing to this statue, and she's trying to read what's on there from a little brochure they gave you at the desk, and she's looking for ox, you know, the symbol of life, and she's trying to find those on, but she's pointing to a cartouche, and she's asking her husband and their child, um, you know, what is this? thinking it's an ox. And I kind of they look at her like she they don't know what she's talking about, which they don't, and and I just go reflexively like that's a cartouche. And then she looked at me like, that's not a cartouche. That's you know, she's because she thinks it's an ox. I'm like, no, that is a magical rope. Look, it's tied right there. You can see the carving. It protects the king's name inside there. That's what here it says Ramsey. Let me read that to you. And we went around the statue, and and we uh I think her husband and child kind of disappeared at this point. We went around reading what was on this uh, you know, the base of the statue until we found her some anks next to you know, given life and stuff like that. And you know, she looked at me like I was from the surface of the moon, you know, that that like I was you know speaking swahili to her or something. Uh it was like crazy. Um, and then we went into uh, you know, I left them to rejoin my wife in the Egyptian exhibit. And you know, I'm just walking through there and I'm like, I can read a lot of this. I mean, not all of it, but like, you know, there's like at least 30, 40 percent of this, at least maybe more, that I can read. I'm like, how is this possible that that all of a sudden um you know the switch got turned on? And and it's just because a lot of it is offering formulas, which we study in class, and and even more specifically, I was looking at, oh, these are actual items, like there was these um necklaces, I think, and bracelets, um sit pathor unit, I think was her name, or something like that, that she um, you know, that we had actually studied in class. Well, that's kind of cheating. Like I had already studied. It wasn't like I was cold reading these. I had already actually, you know, but then you you look at these and you go, well, you know, these things are not actually purely decorative. I mean, they're pretty and everything like that, but they're actually communicating information. Like one of them had like a little tadpole on it. Oh, that's cute. It's got a little tadpole, but it's not because they like tadpoles, it's sort of like you're gonna live forever or eternity or something like that. It's trying to tell you like a thousand years or ten thousand years or whatever it is, you know. And you know, these these people were actually trying. I mean, you say voices of ancient Egypt, and I and I it's a it's an apt meaning because they are trying to talk to you, and they really meant to talk to us. It wasn't just the relatives who were bringing offerings and and hoping God will, you know, gods will provide offerings to them, but they meant they were gonna live forever, and this these things were meant to go through eternity, and so they're trying to have words that people can to talk to the people in the future, and so these so these what looks like just pretty stuff is not, it's actually just like if you opened up a book and go, well, it's nice looking at all these words, isn't that pretty? But those words were meant to say something to you and communicate something and mean something to them. And that's now something that you know at least you know, at a basic level, I can I can do. And and and because it's the stuff in the museum is stuff that we learn in scribal school and master scribes, there's a high percentage of that um that I can read, where when I was taking other classes, none of that is the shipwreck sailor, none of that is a novel on the wall. It's so so I went from having a very low ability to read that stuff to a much higher ability to to read uh the information. I I couldn't walk more than five feet without finding something that I couldn't read. In fact, part of it was missing. Like I think one of the stallions was broken off and it started with like a thousand, you know, oxen, a thousand, you know, fowl or something. I'm like, oh well, guess what? I can actually fill in the first portion of that. There's an offering, and yeah, like I can tell you what exactly it's going to say, roughly. And and none of these um exhibits had the hieroglyphs. Sometimes they had a very loose translation, um, but most of it didn't have anything to tell you what you know it it said. Uh so you're really left just going, isn't that pretty? But it takes on a whole different. I guess it's like standing in a library and opening up the books and not being able to read them and going, Isn't this pretty? The cover's pretty, the artwork's pretty, and the words, gee, isn't that interesting. But then realizing that these have meaning gives the books a whole different understanding of them.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

I love that. It's amazing how much it sounds like your journey has changed really recently. I I think I recall you sharing in the group that it reminded you of a scene from The Matrix.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

Yeah, I mean, it does. It's like, you know, when they load uh the information into Neo's head and he's like, I know Kung Fu. Or like if you're looking at the Matrix and those green letters are just scrolling and they don't and you're just looking at this as meaningless, but he's like eventually it it means something to you, and you can read what it says. Um it is, it it is, it is like that. Um, and uh it's amazing how little time I put into, I guess, scroll compared to other classes that I've taken where that you know, like I believe me, I still have PTSD from that that hieroglyphs my male class. My wife still will not even get near any of this stuff because she just is broken from the mental experience. She graduated with honors and got and just like I can't, I can't. Uh that I mean I scrabble school was really just you know half hour a day, maybe for five days a week. And and and I guess it's partly the repetitive, you know, like there's different you kind of repeat a lot of stuff, so you really are in you know gets ingrained and you really kind of learn it. Yeah, it was it's quite the um it was quite a good experience. I mean, it's quite a revelation in some ways, because having taken a lot of classes, and I guess it's again, I go back to the menu. It's a lot like reading a menu that you can there's repeating patterns in in a in a restaurant menu. You see, you know, you learn the basic setup of the menu that there's a lunch part, a breakfast part. The breakfast part has a something called a grand slam breakfast, and that's made up of you know pancakes and sauce. You know, it's a repeating formula, and you might go to another restaurant, and it may not be called the grand slam breakfast, but you can see the words and it's a different version. It's a repeating pattern. You can see that there's a breakfast portion and you know, a dinner portion, and and you can kind of read it. It's a much smaller ask than trying to ask you to read you know war and peace in German. It's a it's a different the vocabulary. The the other thing that struck me is uh most of the classes had you doing a lot of the writing of the signs themselves, and there's nothing stopping you from doing that, but that was a very large burden to be able to learn to act, and I I can, uh, but it's a lot um to do where that isn't something you really even do. When you're in a restaurant reading the menu, you're not sitting there like transcribing it or writing it out. You're or when you read a book in German, you're not saying you're reading the German, you're reading the menu. You um, but I mean, because I'm not there's not much opportunity in my life or need for that. You know, that I'm gonna be writing out letters in uh um only in that book that we read, and uh that we all uh some of us read that uh scared murder mystery that we that some of us read on the side. Somebody actually in that book wrote uh uh coded letter in hieroglyphs to someone else. I mean it's unlikely I'm gonna be doing that uh while it's a good skill, and I did learn how to do that in the past. Um the and I've enjoyed, you know, you use real examples, so that also helps because it can be, you know, what looking at how they're actually writing these and it's very imperfect and they're taking shortcuts when they were carving this stuff because it sits in stone or something, it's hard. Um, that that helps because when you show up at a museum, it's not going to be perfect either. And it helps, oh yeah, look, yeah, I've seen this shortcut they do before. Yeah, they get kind of lazy with their ends and they, you know, they just It's a line or something like that, uh, or they leave things out. And that that is helpful. And like I say, it was very surprising to see uh how much um and there's probably actually I there's probably more that was in the Met Metropolitan Museum that you've used as as examples.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

I love that you touched on a few things that I think really strike me that you pointed out. One being that not only can you now read all these things you couldn't read before, even though you had studied hieroglyphs multiple times before, but that it was actually easier uh to learn this than what you experienced before, right? Like you were talking about sort of having like a post-traumatic kind of reaction to that experience and how your wife doesn't want to have anything to do with hieroglyphs because of that memory of how it was when you were learning before. And I think I hear from a lot of people who want to learn and they're just afraid that it's too difficult for them, right? So I love how you pointed out that it doesn't have to be this extremely onerous thing with all this unfamiliar English vocabulary and everything else that you had experienced in in other settings.

SPEAKER_01 23:07

And it's also so it's also self-paced in some ways. Uh so other classes, they just moved on, and whether you understood it or not, you had to move on too, because the class moved on, and you got they're trying to pack a lot into a very short period of time. So you're kind of moving at your own pace that you can go back and watch things. You can go, okay, I need to go figure this out, and you're available to ask questions too. So that's that's also helpful. I can post things in the chat, but I can't wait for you know the bi-weekly uh calls and things like that. So there's help to be had uh, you know, that way.

SPEAKER_00 23:42

Love that. And you mentioned time uh earlier in terms of you know not feeling like you need to put in as much time as you might have in other class settings. And also now about it being at your own pace kind of gets it that too, and that you can come for support whenever you need it, whether that's to one of our calls in Master Scribes or um at any time, you know, posting in our community. And that reminded me also that I also I also hear from a lot of people who want to learn hieroglyphs, they're thinking about joining Master Scribes, but they're not sure it's a good time to do it because they feel like they just don't really have a lot of time on their hands, or maybe they even have some big things coming up in life that they're worried are gonna get in the way and they won't be able to make progress. And so I wanted to hear from you your thoughts on like how have you been able to learn to read hieroglyphs in Master Scribes and take advantage of the support there and everything, even with life's other demands.

SPEAKER_01 24:37

Yeah, I mean, there's never a good time. I mean, it's always a bad time. Uh uh and and uh so I mean this month for me, I'm a big bicycle racing fan. So we have the Tour de France. There is five hours of coverage a day plus an after show that's an hour. That's like six hours a day of that coverage if I want to watch as much as I can. So I still find a half hour in the day just to go and and you know, set aside time to go keep moving forward because that's that's what I try to do. It's I'm trying to not have a huge amount of pressure, just simply keep moving the ball forward, and that's enough to, you know, because I guess it's because also the the lessons that you have are broken up into bite-sized pieces so that you can feel like you, you know, instead, you know, you get to an end of a chapter, and there will be 30 rows that you need to go transcribe, transliterate, and go make and you know, like every it's just and then break down the grammar and all it like, okay. This is a you huge amount of work and time, and um where you the c you have everything broken down into much smaller. I mean, the videos are like 10-15 minutes, uh, and you're then going off and doing a series of lessons. Some of them are uh repeating, you know, in a different object, the same sort of formula, that you're getting a different version, a little bit slightly different version, and you're practicing it over and over, and you're going back and practicing. So you're getting some of that repetitive um nature, but it's the fact that it's broken down into smaller pieces that allows you to at least feel like you're making uh progress. And and also, I mean, I guess uh, you know, I don't know. I kind of you're kind of like the Tony Robbins of hieroglyphs in some ways because it because it it's not just go learn the hieroglyphs. Tony Robbins brings a whole support network and meant mental approach to it that has nothing to do with in your case, hieroglyphs. It's all about goal setting and and uh you know as a as a instructional instructional designer. Um I understand the stuff that you're talking about when you're talking about learning principles and and goal setting and things like that, because that's as important as learning the information because it it's it's the the moving forward, keeping yourself motivated, you're gonna get sidetracked, getting back on track, um, you know, and things like that. So that's that's uh and also you you you seem to be the like the hieroglyph whisperer too, because you take a lot of people who have driven into the ditch with hieroglyphs. They bought Gardner's gigantic book and started on page one, and by page 20, they're like, this is this is insane. Uh or somebody like myself that you know you take Hulk and I could use it as a doorstop because it's just it's it I've gotten better with it, I mean, over the years, but it's taken a decade to come to grips with uh the language that he's using, and it's it's learning its own language on top of learning hieroglyphs to learn that. But uh, but you've taken a lot of people who have tried, made honest attempts, and you know, I don't say they failed, they learned something along the way, but they they were not as successful or got as far on their journey as they wanted to, and you've kind of resurrected their their hieroglyphic journey, I guess, in that way.

SPEAKER_00 28:06

Yeah, you make so many great points there about that it's Master Scribes is not just the hieroglyphs curriculum, right? You mentioned um the support. We were talking about the calls before and stuff, but also in terms of the fact that I also do put a lot of emphasis on um ways to approach the learning, right? In terms of, you know, setting goals, scheduling it, and also study strategies that actually make sense with how the brain works, right? I find that so important. And that's why I structure things the way you were talking about, where almost all of the video lessons are less than 15 minutes. That's very intentional and purposeful because it's not only does it make it easier to fit it into your life, right? And uh and feels great, but it's really just it fits with how our brains work. And a lot of traditional methods don't fit with the way our brains work, really. And so, yeah, like you said, a lot of people have tried it before with these other methods. And I love when they come to me because one of the things that I I really hate to see is that a lot of times some people think the problem is them, right? You mentioned kind of blaming yourself for a while, right? Before you eventually realized. Yeah. And so many people think it's like, I just can't do this, like I'm not smart enough, or something's wrong with me, or my memory's not good enough, or whatever it is. When in reality, um, it's generally just that you haven't uh experienced the right approach, haven't had the right support and all of that. Because you mentioned also being able to ask questions anytime, and that's so important when you're learning as well.

SPEAKER_01 29:41

So because I've always believed that uh the instructor makes a difference. I mean, I mean, it's kind of obvious, but it makes a really big difference. I mean, uh what from my childhood, uh, you know, Boy Scouts, we had uh we had to learn uh not tying rear pads. And we had some guy who was ex-Saudi military who taught us children how to tie knots behind our backs, timed, and we learned like 30 different knots that we could tie literally, eyes closed, behind our back, because he had taught people in the military, knew how to transfer this knowledge, and so you know that it made a difference who the instructor was. If I got a different instructor, different result, and and that's kind of why when I saw your your hieroglyph of the day videos, and somehow those clicked with me, I thought this is somebody that mentally I can connect with, you know, as far as learning goes, and maybe that that would make a difference.

SPEAKER_00 30:39

Wonderful. And I love seeing your your journey here and your progress. And I loved your story um that you told here earlier about visiting the Met and having that totally different experience, like like the Epiphany in the Matrix. So as we wind down here, I know there are going to be some folks out there who are really considering joining Master Scribes, and they probably have a lot of questions, hesitations. There's, you know, not sure, they're evaluating the decision. And I'm wondering what you would say to someone who's on the fence about joining, thinking about it, wanting and wanting to come to sort of like a good place where they feel good about their decision and are ready to jump in.

SPEAKER_01 31:20

Yeah, you just have to jump in and make that decision. If this is something that you want to do, you're not gonna get a lot of opportunities to go do this. So you really um, it's like when you're on vacation and you you see something at a you know on a bazaar or fair or store, you're not gonna find it two days later down the road. You need to jump on it right then and there and buy it. Um and it's an investment in yourself. So you really have to decide, you know, is if this is something you want to do, this is definitely one of the best, the best way to go do it.

SPEAKER_00 31:53

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today, John. It's been wonderful having you on.

SPEAKER_01 31:59

Thank you. It's good having you.