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Paid, inside the app

Two courses in the Hierolyte app.

The lessons on this website are free, and so is the Hierolyte app. These two courses are optional extras inside the app: structured lessons with interactive exercises and quizzes, each unlocked by a one-time in-app purchase. On the UK App Store each costs £4.99; other storefronts show their local price.

Reading Real Words is written to follow Reading Royal Names, so most people take them in that order.

A cartouche course

Reading Royal Names

Learn to read the names of Egypt's greatest pharaohs, from Ptolemy to Ramesses.

5 modules · 20 lessons · 100 exercises · 105 quiz questions

Modules

  1. Foundations. Understand what cartouches are, how to read them, and learn the uniliteral signs that appear in royal names.
  2. Cracking the Code. Read the cartouches of Greco-Roman rulers. These purely phonetic spellings of Greek and Latin names are the perfect training ground for your new alphabet skills.
  3. Egyptian Sounds. Master the biliterals, triliterals, and logograms that appear in native Egyptian royal names.
  4. The Great Pharaohs. Read the actual cartouches of Egypt's most famous rulers.
  5. Reading in the Wild. Apply everything to unfamiliar cartouches and real photographs. Develop an independent reading methodology.

The App Store purchase sheet lists this course as the Cartouche Reading Course.

Beyond royal names

Reading Real Words

Learn to read the words the Egyptians used every day: the signs that carry whole sounds and whole ideas, and the silent labels that make a script without vowels read clearly. It ends with a real inscription you will find on stelae the world over.

5 modules · 20 lessons · 80 exercises · 80 quiz questions

Modules

  1. How Egyptian Words Work. How a single sign can carry a sound, a whole word, or a silent meaning, why the script skips vowels, and how to find your way into any inscription.
  2. Two Sounds, One Sign. Signs that pack two consonants into one shape are the workhorses of real Egyptian text, starting with the single most useful sign in the language.
  3. Three Sounds, One Sign. Four signs that carry three consonants each, between them spelling the most common words on every wall: good, life, peace, god.
  4. The Silent Labels. Determinatives as a working tool: the people classifiers, plurality and motion, places and time and the divine, and the principle that ties them together.
  5. The Offering Formula. The capstone: read the most common real Middle Egyptian inscription end to end, the one found on virtually every stela.

Get the courses

Download Hierolyte free for iPhone and iPad (iOS 26 or iPadOS 26 and later), then unlock either course inside the app.

Download Hierolyte