Handy Hieroglyphs A beginners guide to impressing friends and colleagues (in museums)

Handy Hieroglyphs: a beginners guide to impressing friends and colleagues (in museums)

Thursdays, October 15–November 19 (6 weeks), 6pm–8pm, Live on Zoom and Recorded to watch later.

Instructor: Kea Johnston, PhD, ISAC and Field Museum Post-doc

Have you ever wondered what those inscriptions say on Egyptian monuments in museums? Want to impress your friends and family with your Egyptological knowledge? Be the most interesting person at a cocktail party? Now you can! Most inscriptions on statues, offering tables, stele, scarabs, and other commonly displayed objects are formulaic, meaning that you can learn to read them fairly quickly and soon master the basics of hieroglyphs! This class will cover the basics of hieroglyphs, names of rulers and gods, the so-called “hieroglyphic alphabet,” and common phrases and formulae used on museum objects.

Bio: Kea Johnston is an Egyptologist and software engineer. She obtained a BA in Computer Science at Brown University in 2005 and received her PhD in Egyptian Art and Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2022 with a dissertation on the workshops which painted and inscribed coffins at Akhmim in the 1st Millennium BCE. Her interests ancient Egyptian scribal and artistic practice, and the expression of Ancient Egyptian funerary tradition through art. She is currently a Joint Postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum and the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) at the University of Chicago, where she is authoring orchestration software to automate and speed up the process of building and archiving 3D models of artifacts with Photogrammetry.