This volume serves as a thorough and authoritative introduction to the “classical” phase of the ancient Egyptian language and its writing systems, known by convention as Middle Egyptian. It includes sixteen chapters with practice exercises, which offer detailed discussions of the conventional hieroglyphic script, syntax, and grammar, as well as overviews of diachronic change, the hieratic script, and nonstandard hieroglyphic orthographies (so-called cryptography). In addition, the volume includes an answer key to the even-numbered exercises, as well as a series of appendices, featuring an extensive glossary of particles, numerous paradigmatic charts, and a robust sign list.
Joshua Aaron Roberson is associate professor of Art History and Egyptian Language at the University of Memphis, and assistant director of the University’s Institute of Egyptian Art & Archaeology. He is the author of  A Lexikon of Ancient Egyptian Cryptography of the New Kingdom (Berlin, 2020), Ramesside Inscriptions: Historical and Biographical, vol. IX (Wallasey, 2018), The Awakening of Osiris and the Transit of the Solar Barques (Freiburg and Göttingen, 2013), and The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Earth (Atlanta, 2012).