It’s been a while… seven years? Something like that.
I was pretty sure that I was done with the site when I made my last post. I’d left my Ph.D. program by then and moved on to a different career. Even though Egyptology was all I’d known for the bulk of my academic life, I didn’t want anything to do with it anymore. It wasn’t until this past month that I finally opened up a book related to ancient Egypt. Allen and Hoch’s Middle Egyptian Grammars and then Kemp’s Anatomy of a Civilization.
I needed the break from Egypt. Badly. And I’m glad that I can come back to it as a hobby and not rely on it for my livelihood. So much has happened since I left this site. I’m not any less busy, but I’m a whole lot happier. And I’m looking forward to updating the site more often.
That’s not to say it’s going to happen quickly. The lessons are still going to be sitting on the back burner. After going through them the past few weeks, they need a massive rewrite, and I’d prefer not to gouge out my eyes trying to fix them. I’m just going to let them be for now. They’ve sat for years, so what’s another year?
What’s more interesting to me is translating texts. I think I’m going to start a series where I work through one of the grammars or some texts, and publish them on the blog, error-ridden and all. I think that would be a better learning experience to follow someone working through a text or grammar. I’m definitely rusty after seven years but it’s surprising how much I’ve actually retained. We’ll see how it goes.
In terms of what I’ve done with he site, there are a few things. I did a major redesign, and I think it looks better than the original. It was a whole lot easier to do this time around with all the new themes and plugins available in WordPress. What would’ve taken me months took about a week of on and off work.
It has some better features and all the themes and plugins and everything else are all up to date and aren’t completely broken. I couldn’t even edit the site before because everything was out of date and broken.
I think the coolest feature is the addition of hieroglyphic text to the site instead of photos of glyphs. I found a font called SINUHE that will automatically arrange the glyphs into groups. It works most of the time, but some of the arrangements and spacing are a little awkward but it’s a hell of a lot faster than having to type out glyphs in JSesh and then export and image and then place it. I deleted SOOOO many images from this site. More than I should have. Some posts are broken because the images are gone, but I’ll end up fixing them over time.
I removed a bunch of pages and consolidated the sign list. Cool stuff.
tl;dr The site will have some more updates.