The project
About Medu Neter
Medu Neter is a free, structured introduction to reading ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs \u2014 built for the curious beginner and the returning student alike.
The name means “the god's words,” the term the ancient Egyptians themselves used for their writing. The goal of this project is simple: take a script that looks impossibly foreign and make it approachable, one family of signs at a time, until real words start to read themselves.
Real signs, not approximations
Every phonogram on the site is a genuine Egyptian Hieroglyphs Unicode character rendered in a hieroglyphic font, paired with its scholarly transliteration and Gardiner sign-list code. What you learn here matches the references Egyptologists use.
Structure over memorization
Signs are taught in the families they naturally belong to — phonetic classes for the alphabet, Gardiner categories for determinatives — so the system makes sense instead of being a list to cram.
Free and open to all
Medu Neter is free to use. It is supported by donations, not paywalls, so anyone curious about the language of ancient Egypt can start today.