There have been a few new additions to the Pyramid Texts Online website that I’d like to share with you all.
Hieroglyphic Flash Cards
A new online hieroglyphic flash card tool has been created by Plan Zero.
If you are interested in learning the basics of hieroglyphs these are definitely worth a look. It’s still fresh and new (mind the wet paint) so there may be some missing phonograms at the moment but it is expanding every day.
Before you can view the next card you must enter the corresponding transliteration of the hieroglyph, which can be entered via the on-screen letters or your computer’s keyboard. It has both the European and British styles of transliteration as well as MdC, which you can switch between. This is a nice touch as it enables the student to work just on MdC, or the transliteration of their choice. If you leave the page you can pick up where you left off when you return.
It is easily the best system of flash cards I have seen online yet…including those wonderful vocab videos from Bennu. 
Visit the Pyramid Texts Online Tools page, and find the link under the section “Flash Cards”.
The Organisation of the Pyramid Texts
Dr Harold Hays recently contacted to let me know about the forthcoming publication he has written about the Pyramid Texts, The Organization of the Pyramid Texts (a 2 volume set). It should appear before the end of July, the year.
Dr Hays offered a tantalising overview:
“It’s the first comprehensive study of the Pyramid Texts since 1981, and one of the first studies in Egyptology to apply performance theory to the study of ancient Egyptian religion. The first volume makes a classification of Pyramid Texts and determines their original settings in life, as well as dealing in detail with the effects of the transposition of ritual scripts to the pyramid tombs. The second volume consists of reference material: a set of listings of typological information about individual texts, their situations of transmission, and the most important motifs found among texts, as well as a set of 32 plans and 15 charts.”
He also gave me a link to his latest paper, ‘The Death of the Democratization of the Afterlife’, which he asked if I would add it to the Pyramid Texts Online Library. You can find this paper along with other papers by Dr Harold Hays in the Pyramid Texts Online Library.
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