About Scribe School
Scribe School is a history game about how the ancient Egyptians wrote. Many hieroglyphs stood for a single sound, a bit like our letters, so the game teaches 20 picture signs for sounds: a vulture for A, a foot for B, an owl for M, water for N, a mouth for R and more. The pictures are emoji stand-ins for the real signs, and the game says so.
Each lesson teaches a few new signs, then asks you to read words written in signs and to write words by tapping the signs in the right order. Along the way you learn real history: scribes trained for years, they wrote on papyrus made from reeds by the Nile, they usually left the vowels out, and hieroglyphs could be read in different directions.
Lesson seven tells the story of the Rosetta Stone, found in 1799 with the same message in hieroglyphs and Greek, and how Jean-François Champollion cracked the code in 1822 by reading royal names like Ptolemy and Cleopatra inside cartouches. You read royal names in cartouches too, and after lesson three you can write your own name in one. The last lesson is a timed master scribe test.
Best for ages 6+
Free to play. No ads, no sign-up, nothing to download. Privacy