Teach Yourself Hieroglyphics

This is a good beginner's book for this beautiful ancient language. Most of the entire book deals with ancient Egyptian, but there are a few chapters discussing Mayan hieroglyphs as well. The Egyptian text I believe is Middle Egyptian, as it is the most common type of Egyptian I think. The basic "alphabet" is discussed, along with the confusing ideograms, logograms, phonograms, determinatives, etc. There are exercises as well, some are very short, and when you get to the last chapters, you translate somewhat of a long text. All the answers can be found in the back of the book. For Mayan, the basic "alphabet" is discussed as well. There is one whole chapter discussing mayan calenders and numbers, and it is quite interesting. Overall, this is a good book to start out with. However, there are some problems with learning the Middle Egyptian, regarding the way it's read. At some parts, I found it difficult to translate the Egyptian into English because of the way the hieroglyphs were placed. Also, the section for Mayan in the book was too small. The author should have expanded more, because Mayan is just as interesting as any ancient Egyptian language. After reading this book, I would read the book by Mark Collier which goes in more detail for Middle Egyptian. Plus, alot of the exercises from this book seem to come from Collier's book.

In the great tradition of the Teach Yourself series, this one shines. I cannot comment on the Mayan section but the Egyptian one is probably the most complete, yet simple to understand, introduction to Egyptian Hieroglyphics (or Hieroglyphs). It describes the main grammatic topics, including conjugation of verbs, number, possessive pronouns etc. It also includes a chapter on the "offering formula", probably the most common contruction found on monumental inscriptions. The hieroglyphic words are written from right to left (most common way) and are, of course, transliterated correctly. A great book for it price.