You Can Read This Wall

For hundreds of years nobody could read the walls of Egypt. The marks were still there, cut into the stone where anyone could see them. People walked past them every day and could not tell you what they said.

This book does not tell you about hieroglyphs. It hands them to you and you read them.

You start with the silence: what the problem actually was, and why it was never the wall itself. Then you pick up your first sound values, one sign at a time, from a set small enough to actually learn. You find out what the ring around a name is for, why the same word can be written in more than one way, and how they wrote a number.

By the last chapter you are handed a name the book has never shown you, written in the signs you have learned, and asked to work it out on your own. The row is built for you out of those signs, and the name it spells is a real one that a British Museum record confirms. The answer is in the back.

Inside this book

• Seventeen chapters that take you from not one sign to reading a name for yourself
• Four parts: The Silence, The Sounds, The Signs That Are Not Sounds, and Reading Real Things
• The sign list at the back, with the picture, the letter and the code for all 24 signs of the small set
• A plain explanation of how we know what a sign says
• A word list with one key term from every chapter
• Illustrations throughout in the flat style of Egyptian tomb painting

Written for readers aged 8 to 12.