December 18, 2025
Glyphs, glitches & hot takes
Learn Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Everyone’s learning hieroglyphs—site crashes, vowel drama erupts
TLDR: A beginner lesson on Egyptian hieroglyphs went viral, teaching the “read toward the face” trick and consonant-focused writing. The community battled over vowel confusion, griped about the site crashing, and used an archived link to keep learning, sparking jokes about ancient “responsive design.”
Ancient Egyptian for everyone? The new Lesson 1 promises a beginner-friendly crash course—complete with the simple “read toward the face” trick and the wild left-or-right reading that let Egyptians blend writing into art. But the community story is pure chaos. One fan squealed, “My 10-year-old self would be all over this,” while another hit Safari only to get “Failed to open page.” Cue the rescue: jameslk swoops in with an archived version because the site was “hugged to death.”
Then came the flame war: the lesson says hieroglyphs omit vowels, yet the chart describes sounds like “ah,” “ee,” and “oo.” Commenters debated whether those are real vowels or just transliteration—a method for writing sounds in our alphabet—used to make reading easier. Pilaf asked if vowel-ish glyphs are “special occasion” only; others argued the script mainly writes consonants, and learners add “e” sounds to pronounce words.
Nerd flex moment: mstngl dropped a line of actual hieroglyphs, then apologized for “misuse,” and warned that webfonts can break the magic. Meanwhile, milchek loved the idea that direction flips to fit walls and art, dubbing Egyptians the original “responsive designers.” Want the lesson? Try the Start Lessons page—if you can get in.
Key Points
- •Hieroglyphs can be written in rows or columns and read from either left or right, depending on sign orientation.
- •To determine reading direction, look for a sign with a face and read toward it; stacked signs are read top before bottom.
- •Signs are grouped to reduce empty space, arranging tall and small signs together (group writing).
- •Transliteration focuses on uniliterals (single-consonant signs), with biliterals and triliterals also present; an alphabet chart is provided.
- •Vowels are not written in hieroglyphs; a simple vocalization convention inserts “e” between consonants, with deeper phonology research cited.