Ancient Egypt · Free, age 8 to college

Ancient Egypt

Three thousand years of kings, temples and tombs along one river, and a script no one could read for fourteen centuries until it was cracked in 1822. Here you can learn it the way a good college program teaches it: the history and how its dates are known, the gods, temples and art, the archaeology, and Middle Egyptian, the language of the hieroglyphs. There's a first course for young explorers, too.

🏺 The Egyptology Ladder 🏛️ The sites 🧊 3-D models 🗺️ The map ⏳ The timeline

The Egyptology Ladder

Six courses, 306 short topics, each with a lesson and practice that checks your answers and brings topics back for review. Middle Egyptian I and II stand on their own; Religion, Art and Architecture and Archaeology and Later Scripts build on the history course.

Ancient Egypt for Young ExplorersElementary · grades 3–7 · 40 topicsFor ages 8 to 12: the Nile and its flood, pharaohs and pyramids, gods and mummies, daily life, hieroglyphs and your name in a cartouche, and how Egypt was rediscovered. History of Ancient EgyptHigh school · grades 9–12 · 60 topicsA survey from the first farmers to the Arab conquest of AD 641: how the dates are built, the kingdoms and intermediate periods, the great rulers, and how Egyptians lived and governed. Middle Egyptian ICollege · 56 topicsA first semester of the classical language: the signs, transliteration, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, prepositions, sentences without verbs, numbers, royal names and the offering formula. Middle Egyptian IICollege · 52 topicsThe verb system, from the infinitive and the sḏm=f to participles, the passive and negation, then real texts in short passages: stelae, Sinuhe, the Eloquent Peasant and the Rosetta Stone. Religion, Art and ArchitectureHigh school · grades 9–12 · 51 topicsThe gods and their cults, creation accounts, kingship and maat, temples and festivals, the afterlife and mummification, tombs and pyramids, and the rules of Egyptian art. Archaeology and Later ScriptsCollege · 47 topicsHow Egypt was rediscovered: the Rosetta Stone and decipherment, excavation and dating methods, epigraphy, museums and the return debate, and the later scripts: hieratic, Demotic and Coptic.

Where to start

Ages 8 to 12: Ancient Egypt for Young Explorers, read together with a grown-up or on your own.
High school: History of Ancient Egypt, then Religion, Art and Architecture.
To read hieroglyphs: Middle Egyptian I starts from the first sign; no history needed.
Not sure? Find your rung with a short placement check.

The sites and their inscriptions

Nineteen great sites from Rosetta in the Delta to Abu Simbel in Nubia: who built what, what survives, and the inscriptions you can still read there, each in hieroglyphs with a sign-by-sign reading and a translation.

Explore the sites →

3-D models

Walk around the Giza plateau, cut open the Great Pyramid, step through a temple from pylon to sanctuary, watch Abu Simbel move to higher ground, and go down into Tutankhamun's tomb, all built to published measurements.

Map of Egypt and Nubia

The Nile from the Mediterranean to Khartoum, the Delta and the cataracts, with more than fifty ancient sites by period. Tap a site for a short note.

Open the full map: zoom, pan and layers by period →

Three thousand years at a glance

The periods of Egyptian history with their dynasties. Tap a period for its dates. The whiskers show how uncertain the early dates are.

Egypt on the Timeline of the Ancient World →

Your name in a cartouche

Type a name to write it with Egyptian sound signs, the way scribes spelled Greek names like Ptolemy and Cleopatra.

The full cartouche maker: choose signs, print or save →

Hieroglyph tools

More on Teddy Rook Book

Dates follow Shaw, ed., The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000); before 664 BC they are approximate. Hieroglyphs on this site are drawn for Teddy Rook Book in the font TRB Hieroglyphs (SIL Open Font License), and Coptic letters come from GNU FreeFont.