The Digital Encyclopedia of Egypt

Seven thousand years, in one place

Sourced history, a script you can learn and write your name in, and culture, places and games. Sawah is not a site about Egypt — it is Egypt, arranged so you can know it and live it.

See what's inside Enter the encyclopedia

Every fact sourced
Fully Arabic and English
Completely free

1,072

hieroglyphic signs indexed and machine-verified against the Unicode database

Every historical claim is tied to a source, with its confidence level stated beside it.
The sign catalogue is machine-verified against Unicode, and we intend to publish it as open data.
Not an archive — a cartouche you write, a daily challenge, a working Egyptian calendar.

1,072

signs indexed

historical periods

major eras

languages from day one

The full index

Everything in Sawah, on one screen

Eighteen doors, all open: archives to read, tools to use, and places where you do the writing. Every number below is counted from the rows themselves as the page loads, never typed in by hand.

To read and explore

To use and try

Yours

Ask Sawah

Egypt's scribe at your service

Ask about a king, a temple, a word or an era, and the scribe answers from Sawah's published pages alone — and points you to the page the answer came from.

Ask Sawah

Answers from Sawah's pages and their sources only

Peace be upon you — I am Sawah's scribe. Ask me about Egypt's history, places, myths and words, and I will answer from what we publish, with the page to check it on.

This is an automated assistant, not a historian. It can be wrong, and its answers are not a scholarly reference. Always check the sources attached to each article.

The history of Egypt

Seven thousand years, divided into chapters

284 chapters across 7 eras, from prehistoric Egypt to the Republic — each one with its sources listed beneath it.

Egypt today

See all news

Your way into Egypt

Egypt is not one subject — it is a whole civilisation

History, language, culture, places and games. Each is a world of its own, and every one of them opens from here.

A stone wall at Karnak temple covered in carved hieroglyphs and royal cartouches

HieroglyphsLearn the script and write your name in it

The great hypostyle hall at Karnak — rows of massive inscribed columns

Egypt's HistoryPredynastic to today, every chapter sourced

An interior wall at Abu Simbel lit from below, carved with registers of sunk relief showing the king before the gods

GamesA daily challenge and quizzes about Egypt

The alleyways of Khan el-Khalili in old Cairo, with its shops and lanterns

CultureThe Egyptian calendar that still works

An ancient Egyptian funerary papyrus with painted script and figures

Practise the signsSpaced-repetition cards until they stick

The temple of Philae at Aswan seen across the water of the Nile

DiscoverAncient sites and museums

Two feluccas on the Nile at Aswan at sunset, with the sun reflected across the water

Why Sawah

The Nile has not changed. What changed is that someone had to write the story properly.

Arabic material about ancient Egypt online is largely carelessly translated, copied without a source, or myth repeated until it passes for fact. We write it as Arabic, and every claim carries its source and its confidence level.

How we work

Nile at Aswan · Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Places in Egypt

From the Egyptian Museum to Café Riche — in one place

Museums, heritage sites, temples, hotels, restaurants and places to unwind — 1958 of them, each with its coordinates, a description, and a map or official site one tap away.

See all places

115 places in this category

Write your name

Your name in hieroglyphs, one sign per sound

Not letter for letter. The engine breaks a name into sounds, writes the sign each sound takes, and tells you which sign came from which — and where it had to approximate.

مريمmrjm
أحمدꜣḥmd
نورnwr

Three names written by the same engine that will write yours — not an illustration of it.

Write your name

The alphabet

Twenty-four signs, each carrying a sound

This is the closest thing Egyptian had to an alphabet: the signs that carry a single consonant. Any name is written with them, and any learning starts here.

ꜣa (glottal, as in 'ah')
ji / y
yy
ꜥayin
ww / u
bb
pp
ff
mm
nn
rr
hh (soft)
ḥemphatic h
ḫkh, as in Scottish 'loch'
ẖsofter kh
ss
šsh
qemphatic q
kk
ghard g
tt
ṯtj, as in 'church'
dd
ḏdj

Each sign with its transliteration and its sound. Egyptian wrote no vowels at all — every sound above is a consonant.

The full table, with pronunciation

The calendar

Today's date, in two Egyptian calendars

The ancient Egyptian and the Coptic calendars are the same year in every structural detail, separated by one leap day every four years. See how far that one day has taken them.

Coptic — the fixed year

7 Paopi

Year 1743 of the Martyrs

Ancient Egyptian — the wandering year

4 Paremhat

Year 2775 of Nabonassar

The gap between them today

218 days

One leap day every four years, for 2,774 years.

The whole gap, and where each is counted from

Surviving words

Words we still say — and words we think we do

Every entry carries its chain of descent, a lexicographic source, and a stated confidence level. The third level — widespread and wrong — is half the feature, not an appendix to it.

Settled
𓅓𓋴𓎛mzḥتمساح
The initial t- is not part of the word: it is a feminine definite article fused onto the noun, as in timthāl. The disagreement is not about the Egyptian source but about the route. Bishai takes it through Coptic ⲧⲉⲙⲥⲁϩ; Corriente objects that Crum records the Coptic word as masculine, so a feminine article is irregular, and argues Arabic took it from Ancient Egyptian directly at an earlier stage. The best case for the Coptic route is that the feminine-articled form is itself attested in Coptic personal names (ϯⲉⲙⲥⲁϩ). The Egyptian word is given as mzḥ, as in the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae; older transliteration writes msḥ — the same word.
Disputed
ϩⲁⲗⲱⲙhalōmحالوم
Nobody doubts the two words are one; the question is which way it went. Bishai has Arabic borrowing from Coptic ϩⲁⲗⲱⲙ. Corriente notes that ḥālūm is already in the classical Arabic dictionaries, so the borrowing must be older than Bishai assumes. Vittmann — supported by Behnstedt and Woidich, as Corriente reports — argues the reverse: that Coptic took the word from Arabic. The Coptic dictionary gives it no older Egyptian source.
Widespread and wrong
ʾ-m-nآمين
The most famous claim in this whole area: that āmīn at the end of a prayer is a survival of the god Amun's name. It does not hold up on any front. Amun, Jmn, is an Egyptian name from a root meaning “to conceal” — “the Hidden One” — recorded as such in the Berlin dictionary. Āmīn is Hebrew, from the root ʾ-m-n, “to be firm, to be faithful”, the same root behind īmān and amāna in Arabic. Two languages, two roots, two meanings; only the letters resemble each other.

All thirteen entries

Today's challenge

A name written in hieroglyphs. Whose is it?

One question a day on Cairo time, five attempts, and a hint after each. Your streak is kept on your own device.

#289

7 signs

Whose name is this?

Play today's challenge

Governorate rooms

A room for every governorate, messages arriving live

Twenty-seven rooms, one for each Egyptian governorate. Walk into yours and find people from home; a message appears for everyone without a page refresh.

Tap your governorate to go straight in.

Enter your room

Community

What members write, kept apart from the editorial content

A place for Egyptians to write about Egypt: a visit, something they know, a correction. It stays visually separate from the encyclopedia, so a reader always knows who is speaking.

Nobody has written yet. Whoever goes first starts this place.

Read the community

Egyptian mythology