Talking Pyramids: Ancient Egyptian Pyramids

The new library at Pyramid Texts Online
The Pyramid Texts Online website has had a major update with the addition of the Library. Sit down and relax with an old classic, flick through the pages on-screen thanks to the Internet Archive’s Flip Book. Due to the antique age of most of these books it […]

Photo: Stanford News Service

Ancient Egyptian texts discarded more than 2000 years ago such as mundane documents, letters & contracts were recycled and used to plaster over mummies. Now the Stanford University is analysing these papyri to give insight into what life was like in Ptolemaic times.
“”I’m the one in charge of making sense of […]

A message from Saint Simian:
Hello to all Egyptologists with computers,
I’ve been working on a web application to help us all with our Hieroglyphic texts. It’s a Hieroglyphic dictionary wiki, like Wikipedia’s wiktionary except for Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs.
A wiki is like a website where everyone can edit the pages. When everyone can edit at […]

JSesh is a free Open Source hieroglyphic editor for ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic texts. It’s quite a useful tool and covers most of the Manuel de Codage system. You can download it from the JSesh website.
Some new tutorials have recently been added to the website. The most recent tutorial shows in detail how to create […]

This week’s ‘Photo of the Week’ is of the Unas Sarcophagus chamber. This photo shows the chamber’s ceiling near the eastern end of the north wall.
The texts that can be seen in the lower section of the photograph detail the purifications and presentation of offerings.

I have updated the Pyramid Texts Online Tools page with the addition of a useful Dictionary of Middle Egyptian. This dictionary was created by Paul Dickson as a result of his frustration with the existing dictionaries and their arrangement around the approximate sounds of the words instead of their spelling, as dictionaries are usually […]

Professor Richard Steiner’s interpretation of Semitic passages in Egyptian texts, and the subsequent press release around the world prompted a response from Professor Dr. Thomas Schneider, Chair in Egyptology, Department of Classics, Ancient History, and Egyptology at the University of Wales Swansea, UK.
Schneider objected to Steiner’s proposition and suggested that Steiner was not familiar with […]

In the news a year ago today (OK it was really yesterday) was this story by National Geographic.
I have included an image cropped from my website: www.pyramidtextsonline.com that contains the text in question: Utterrances 238-242 from the Unas pyramid.
It is suggested that the hieroglyphics read: “Mother snake, mother snake says mucus-mucus.” when read as a […]