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.
045: Hieroglyphs, Herons, & How to be Your Own Phoenix
•Melinda Nelson-Hurst, Ph.D. (Voices of Ancient Egypt)
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In this inspiring episode of the Voices of Ancient Egypt podcast, a morning walk and a chance encounter with a Great Blue Heron spark a deeper connection between ancient Egyptian mythology, personal momentum, and reigniting long-held passions.
The heron was the sacred Egyptian Benu bird (the original inspiration for the Phoenix), the bird of creation and rebirth. Creating a new level, almost a new form of himself is exactly what hieroglyphs student, Mike, did. He ignited a higher level of excitement and passion that he ever had before and transformed his upcoming dream trip to Egypt by learning hieroglyphs.
Learn how you can capture this same moment of excitement and inspiration for yourself in this episode.
What You'll Learn in This Episode: • The Myth of the Benu Bird & The Phoenix: How a modern Great Blue Heron connects directly to ancient Egyptian creation myths, primeval mounds arising from the waters, and the ultimate symbol of rebirth and self-generation.
• Ancient Egyptian Creation Mindset: Why ancient Egyptians had no problem accepting multiple coexisting creation stories, and what modern learners can gain from that flexible worldview.
• The Two-Month Preparation Sprint: How student Mike prepared for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Egypt in just eight weeks using Scribal School—and reached a level of excitement he didn't even think was possible.
• Dethroning the "Inspiration First" Myth: Why sitting back and waiting for inspiration to strike leads to stagnation, whereas action actively creates the inspiration you've been waiting for.
• The Action-Inspiration Feedback Loop: How taking concrete steps builds momentum that fuels your passion, whether you are learning hieroglyphs, planning a local museum visit, or exploring ancient history books on your shelf.
• Bouncing Back from Detours: How to navigate unexpected disruptions—like business trips or busy schedules—and quickly jump back into pursuing your goals.
• The "One Action" Daily Challenge: A clear assignment to select one task you have been putting off and take a single step toward it today.
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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 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. 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 to the Voices of Ancient Egypt podcast. I'm really excited to bring this one to you today. This is a bit different. It's something, honestly, that just occurred to me this morning before recording, and it really got me excited and wanting to share this with you today. So what happened this morning is I was on a walk, and one of the things I love about living where I do is that I live in a subtropical climate, which granted is not always the funnest when it's say summer and it's exceptionally hot and humid. But one of the things I love about it is all the similarities to Egypt. Now, Egypt is of course a lot drier, a whole lot less rain than where I live, but they're both of a very similar latitude and have similar waterways and such. And so, because of that, we have a lot of the same animal life or very similar species, particularly waterfowl. And so this morning when I was walking, I happened to see a great blue heron hanging out on a log. And I stopped to look at it and to take a picture. And this inspired me and reminded me of something that one of my students said to me recently. And I'll come back to the heron in a minute to let you know why it inspired me, because this might seem like a bit of a weird leap here. But what it inspired me to think about is a student of mine named Mike. And so Mike came to me and said, you know, I just found your podcast and I'm really excited. I'm heading to Egypt in two months, and I really want to take your course, scribal school. I'm totally convinced that this is what I need to prepare for my trip. I've loved all your episodes where you talked about that, and I want to get started right away. Is this something I can actually do in only two months? And so I wrote back to him and said, absolutely, that's something you can do in two months. And he told me like his schedule and how it would work. And yeah, I'm like, absolutely. And so Mike dove in right away and has been making great progress. And then he wrote to me recently, his trip's coming up really soon. And he wrote to me recently about just a minor technical question about the program. And I wrote back to him and he then replied again to me. And this is what I thought of when I was looking at that heron this morning. He wrote back and thanked me and said, Yes, everything's working. It's great. And he's he said, Your course is super cool, and I'm even more excited about going to Egypt than I was before, if that's even possible. And I love that sentiment where Mike, he was already so excited about going to Egypt. This was a trip that he's been wanting to make. It's kind of like a once-in-a-lifetime thing for him, and he wants to make the most of it. And then he said, now that he's part of the way through scribal school, he's even more excited than he was to start with. He said, I didn't even think that was possible, right? And I thought of this because I feel like, in a way, what Mike is going through is this renewed excitement, right? This feeling of renewal and things are new and exciting, and this is a new venture that he's going on, and he's going on this trip. So this could apply to many other things, obviously. If we're talking about something like this where you're learning to read hieroglyphs and you want to go see them in real life, you could have a museum trip coming up, whether it's locally or further away, or it could be Egypt, or it could be just you want to enjoy the books you have already on your shelf on a brand new level, right? And the reason the heron made me think of this is because the great blue heron is very similar to the herons that they had in ancient Egypt. They're both the two largest species of heron. And the heron in ancient Egypt was called the Benu bird. And the Benu bird is the inspiration for the idea of the phoenix that you've probably heard of before, but you might not know the story of the heron in the ancient Egyptian context. So the Benu bird, this heron, is this bird of creation. At the beginning of time, when no two things existed, that's how the ancient Egyptians describe it, it was just a watery abyss, essentially. And there are lots of different versions of creation from ancient Egypt, and the ancient Egyptians had no problem with us. Those of us in the modern West find this a little difficult to wrap our heads around sometimes, but not a problem for the ancient Egyptians. And they could have all these coexisting versions. Some were preferred in some places and times, but they also didn't think it was a problem to have more than one version. So, in some versions, creation kind of kicks off with this bird that creates itself on a mound of land that comes out of the water. And the bird flies, alights, and lands on the mound of earth. And this is symbolic of the sun and the creation of the sun. And now you have not just this watery abyss, but you have land, you have the sun, you have basically the basic elements of our world, right? And so when I saw the heron this morning, it reminded me of this idea of creation and this idea of rebirth. And right, like if you think of the phoenix, of course, what is the whole underlying meaning of the phoenix is this idea of self-recreation, this rebirth that the phoenix can go through. It regenerates itself, right? And when I was thinking about the heron and this symbolism behind it, that's what made me remember Mike's comment that he sent to me in an email about a week before recording this. And it made me realize how much Mike's experience really is reflective of that idea, of that rebirth, right? He already had this love for ancient Egypt. He was already so excited about it that he booked this amazing trip to Egypt that he's looking forward to. He's traveling a really long distance to get there. It's a huge deal for him, you know? And so this was something he obviously already loved, been a long time passion. And he was so looking forward to this trip already. So much so that he realized after listening to my podcast episodes that he really wanted to learn hieroglyphs before he goes. And then not only that, once he started actually learning hieroglyphs, and when he told me this, he was about a maybe a third to halfway through scribal school, he said that he's even more excited than he was before. And he didn't even think that that was possible because he was already so excited. And so this really inspired me when I first read it when he sent it to me, but it re-inspired me again today in conjunction with the heron. The two together really inspired me and reminded me of how we all have this chance every day, right? We don't have to wait for New Year's Day, we don't have to wait for our birthday, we don't even have to wait for a trip coming up, right? We can get this new excitement, this sort of rebirth of our passions and our dreams anytime we want it. It's available there to us. And what brings that out? What is it that has made Mike have that sort of intense, almost rebirth of his passion, right? Not that it died before, but it's taken to another level now. And I think it's not necessarily just that he's going on a trip. It's not just that he has this passion for ancient Egypt. And it's not just that he's taking a program of mine, right? Those are all wonderful things to do and really work very well together, of course. But I think it's not just about those individual things. Like if you're listening to this podcast, you probably love ancient Egypt too. But you might have periods, right, where you've gone gone through where you didn't really do anything about it for a while. You know, life was busy or you just, you know, just weren't feeling inspired about it, or whatever it might be. But I think the key to why Mike feels this way is that he's taking action. And sometimes we might wait for that rebirth feeling, that inspiration to take action, but really it's actually the action that creates that, that creates that new level of excitement, that creates that rebirth of our passion, of our dedication, of our overall excitement for actually pursuing what we're pursuing. And it this reminded me of a fact that, of course, I knew already, I've encountered it before, and I've probably talked about it on the podcast before, although maybe I haven't, is that a lot of times, you know, you've probably heard this if you've ever wanted to write a book, for example, or even a short story, that you can't wait for inspiration to strike you, right? You have to take action. So if you're a writer, you know that it's vital that you write and that you write as often as possible. And inspiration only finds you if you're taking action, right? It's not that you wait for the inspiration first and sit around going, hmm, that man, I wish I was inspired, right? And then you write. And stuff might come to you at odd times, but for the most part, that only happens if you're actually writing regularly. So I just use this as a metaphor because it again, it's the same with Egyptian or anything else. If you're learning the Egyptian language, right? You can kind of think about it and be like, that would be really cool and everything, but it's not the same as when you actually start doing it. You take that action, you show yourself that you're doing this, and you start to see those results. And that's exactly what Mike has done. He dove in, he's getting ready for his trip, and he's that much more excited because he knows that now that he started that momentum, he started moving and he's seeing those results, that he's just, you know, triply inspired essentially now compared to where he was before. And he knows that he's gonna have a trip that is just so amazing on the next level, that that in turn builds, of course, on that inspiration too. So it's really a feedback loop. And the taking action gives you that inspiration, that excitement, that passion. And then that inspiration, excitement, and passion helps you also then keep taking action. And it's this wonderful loop. And even though he told me in that same email, actually, that he went on a business trip recently, which he felt like threw him off track a little bit, he was so excited to jump back in and continue to prepare for his trip that's coming up really soon. And I cannot wait to hear Mike's story when he gets back. Actually, I'm definitely going to ask him about that. And I know he's gonna have an amazing time. And I hope that this episode inspires you to take action today, whether that's on learning hieroglyphs or something else that maybe you've been really wanting to do but putting off, or maybe sort of waiting for that inspiration or that perfect time to strike you. It doesn't come on its own. You got to take action to make it happen. So, your assignment for today is to pick what that thing is and take one step today. And I can't wait to hear what that step is for you. I would love for you to send me a direct message on Instagram or reply to one of my emails and let me know. I'd love to know what are you taking action on today. And until next time, stay curious.
