How the lessons and news are produced.

Hierolyte publishes two kinds of article: free lessons on reading hieroglyphs, and news about new finds, exhibitions, and research. This page states plainly how both are made, because readers, and the researchers whose work we report, deserve to know.

Lessons

Each lesson starts from a fact sheet prepared and checked before any drafting begins: the signs, readings, and examples it may use. Grammar lessons are checked claim by claim against Sir Alan Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar and James P. Allen's Middle Egyptian, and where the two disagree the lesson says so or names the one it follows. Every hieroglyphic example is typeset with JSesh and checked against its printed spelling. The drafts are written with AI assistance and read and approved by the editor before they are published.

Where news comes from

News is drawn from a maintained list of sources: museums, universities, ministries of antiquities, research publications, and specialist magazines and websites. A story built on a magazine feature, a book, or a review names that source and is not presented as a new discovery. We do not source stories from social media, forums, or anonymous claims.

How news articles are written

Articles are drafted with AI assistance, working only from the cited source material. The drafting rules are strict: no facts, dates, measurements, or translations that the source does not state; no invented readings of hieroglyphic texts; claims attributed to the institutions that made them. A draft that cannot support an honest article is discarded rather than padded.

Human review before publication

Nothing is published automatically. Every draft sits in a review queue until a human editor has read it, checked it against its sources, and approved it. Publication is technically blocked - at the database level - for any article without at least one verified source.

Sources on every story

Every published article lists its sources at the end, with links. Where a news service credits an original institution, we cite the institution as well when a verifiable link exists. Articles drafted with AI assistance say so beside the byline.

Images

Photographs are used only under open licences (public domain, CC0, CC BY, or CC BY-SA), always with a visible credit line naming the photographer and licence. Where no openly licensed photograph exists, articles carry a stylised illustration that is clearly labelled as such; we never present generated imagery as a photograph of a specific find.

Corrections

If we have got something wrong, we want to know. Use the contact form (topic: Egyptological correction) and we will review promptly. Corrected articles are updated in place; the correction is noted where it materially changes the story.

Hierolyte is edited by Lucas Young. Read more about Hierolyte.