Learn to read
hieroglyphs.
One beautiful glyph each day. Build your knowledge of ancient Egyptian writing through daily reveals, flashcard review, and two structured paid courses. Five minutes a day.
How it works
A glyph a day. A writing system for life.
No overwhelm. No firehose of information. Glyphs unlock daily, ordered by frequency so you learn the most useful signs first.
Reveal
A new glyph unlocks at midnight. Learn its sound, meaning, and see it used in a real word.
Learn
Progressive articles teach how hieroglyphs actually work - phonograms, ideograms, determinatives.
Review
Swipe-based flashcards with spaced repetition. Glyphs you struggle with appear more often.
Track
Streaks, progress bars, and a calendar heatmap keep you coming back. Build a daily habit.
Features
Museum quality. Scholar-grade accuracy.
Every glyph rendered by JSesh, the academic standard for Egyptological typesetting. Every fact verified against the scholarly literature.
212 Glyphs and Counting
Starting from the most common signs in ancient texts. Uniliterals, biliterals, triliterals, determinatives, and ideograms - all properly classified.
9 Educational Articles
From "What Are Hieroglyphs?" to phonetic complements and reading direction. Progressively unlocked as you advance.
Flashcard Review
Swipe right for "got it", left for "review again". The app prioritises glyphs you've struggled with. Session summaries show your accuracy.
Streaks & Progress
Daily streak counter, longest streak record, calendar heatmap, and category breakdowns by Gardiner classification.
Example Words
Every glyph comes with an attested Egyptian word showing the sign in context, with transliteration and translation.
Gardiner Classification
Browse by category - Body Parts, Birds, Plants, Sky & Earth. Filter your collection and see progress per category.
See it in action
Designed to feel like a museum, not a classroom.
Warm tones, scholarly typography, and hieroglyphs that glow against the dark. Built for focused, beautiful learning.
iPhone
Today's glyph
Cartouche course lesson
Interactive exercises
iPad
Glyph detail on iPad
Course lesson on iPad
Exercises on iPad
Paid Courses
Two structured paths into reading.
Cartouche Reading Course - read the names of pharaohs from Ptolemy to Ramesses. Greco-Roman phonetics through New Kingdom throne names, with real temple photography and JSesh-rendered cartouches throughout.
Reading Real Words - the bones of the writing system itself. Biliterals, triliterals, determinatives, and the offering formula every Egyptologist learns first. Capstone: read a real offering formula on a stela photograph.
80 exercises ยท 80 quiz questions
Discoveries
Latest from the world of ancient Egypt.
Excavations, exhibitions, and research, reported from verifiable institutional sources. Every story cites where it came from.
New study argues Meretneith was a female king in early Egypt
A new study revisits the long-running debate over Meretneith, a royal woman buried some 5,000 years ago in a tomb fit for a male ruler. According to The Conversation, the study argues she should be recognised as a female king in her own right.
1 min read
The Collector explores Gilles Deleuze's admiration for Egyptian art
The Collector has published an essay on how the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze admired ancient Egyptian art and its resilience. The piece challenges the long-standing Western tendency to treat Greek culture as the true origin of civilisation.
2 min read
When half an animal stands for the whole idea
Egyptian scribes rarely drew a whole animal when a head or a pair of horns would do. This beginner lesson looks at six such signs and follows how a fragment came to carry meanings, from cattle and danger to opening, piercing and what lies innermost.
3 min readFree tool
Your name, the way pharaohs wrote theirs.
Type any name and see it spelled in real Egyptian hieroglyphs inside a royal cartouche - the same signs Champollion used to read Cleopatra's name on the Rosetta Stone. Free, instant, and yours to download and share.
Academic Foundations
Built on serious scholarship.
Every glyph, transliteration, and example word is cross-referenced against the standard Egyptological references. This isn't a novelty app - it's a genuine learning tool.
Start reading the
words of the pharaohs.
Free on the App Store for iPhone and iPad.
Learn to read hieroglyphs in 5 minutes a day.