Questions we get asked

A digital encyclopedia of Egypt: sourced history, a hieroglyph academy, culture, and games. We open one part after another, as each becomes ready.

Yes. Reading, learning, generating a cartouche and downloading it as an image are all free and need no account.

Some extras will be paid later (such as high-resolution export for print), but the core stays open.

No. Reading, learning, generating a cartouche and the daily challenge all work without signing up.

An account does one thing: it carries your progress and saved items between your devices. Without one they stay in your own browser — fully working, but they do not follow you to your phone.

Arabic and English in full from day one, on every screen.

Other languages (French, German, Italian) are in preparation and will not be opened before human review.

Because every historical claim is tied to a recorded source, with its confidence level stated next to it: scholarly consensus, disputed, or popular myth.

If you find something wrong or a weak source, tell us — we will correct it and say that we did.

From Wikidata, under CC0 — public domain, requiring neither permission nor attribution. We credit it anyway, and link every entry directly, so you can check it or correct it there and the correction reaches us.

Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons, and we reject any file that forbids commercial use or derivatives.

We take nothing from Google Maps or any service whose terms forbid it.

Do read it — we sometimes start research there ourselves. The honest answer is that the difference is not the same on every page here.

The history chapters are carried from Wikipedia — all of them, without exception. We say so beneath every chapter, with its licence, and with the fact that its references came with it and we have not read them. Wikipedia does not tell you that about itself, but it does not make a chapter more than a declared transposition.

What we wrote and checked ourselves is a different matter: the sign catalogue is machine-verified against the Unicode database; the surviving-words page gives every entry a chain of descent, a lexicographic reference and a stated confidence level — including a section for what is widespread and wrong; the calendar is computed from a named epoch; the place and work data comes from Wikidata with its licence named.

And one difference holds throughout: everything here exists in full in Arabic and English, the origin of everything is written down, and where we are not certain we say so instead of going quiet.

Writing the history chapters ourselves is the work ahead of us, not the work behind us.

No, and we say so on every chapter rather than only here.

The history chapters were gathered in one pass from encyclopedia articles and their references. The text is carried from Arabic or English Wikipedia under CC BY-SA, and the references beneath it came with it — we have not read them ourselves, so the attribution is inherited rather than independently checked. That sentence sits under every chapter.

We show them because hiding them would mean a page saying "not written yet" above millions of characters that were in fact gathered. Human review happens chapter by chapter, and that line changes when it does.

No — and this is the most important question on this page.

What happens is a phonetic approximation: we take the sounds of your name and find the closest signs. It is not a translation of what your name means, nor "correct" in the sense an ancient Egyptian scribe would have written it.

The Egyptian script did not write vowels at all, and the reconstructed pronunciation is scholarship. All of this is stated plainly next to the result.

Yes. The cartouche you generate from your name is yours — use it however you like, personally or commercially, without our permission and without crediting us.

We ask one thing: do not present it as a translation. It is a phonetic approximation, and presenting it otherwise spreads exactly the error this site was built to correct.

Every image on the site comes from Wikimedia Commons under a licence that permits republication: CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA. We deliberately reject files marked non-commercial or no-derivatives.

Full attribution for each file — photographer and licence — is recorded in the repository and shown wherever the licence requires it.

If you see an image you believe we have no right to use, tell us and it comes down while we check.

For now: report an error, or suggest a better source — that is the most useful thing you can do.

A full community contribution system is deferred until we have moderation tools, reporting, and clear terms of use.