Mnamon

Ancient writing systems in the Mediterranean

A critical guide to electronic resources

Egyptian Hieroglyphics

- (3150 BC - 4th century AD)


Online resources



Web sites of general interest

  1. Egyptology Resources - Nigel Strudwick
    Edited by the Egyptologist N. Strudwick with the assistance of the Newton Institute of Cambridge, the site offers a series of internet resources for Egyptology; this page offers links to the main centers of international research, organized by continent and nations
  2. Digital Egypt for Universities
    Resource for learning and teaching, in collaboration with University College, London and the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology

Online documents

  1. The EEF Guide to Internet Resources for Ancient Egyptian Texts
    Provides links to hundreds of Egyptian texts from the Pre-dynastic to the Ptolemaic period
  2. Project Rosette - Text Database
    Provides hieroglyphic text, transcription and rough translation of Stele C14, Story of the shipwrecked sailor, Autobiography of Amenemheb (TT 85)
  3. The Ancient Egypt Site
    Edited by J. Kinnaer, it provides the English translation and a comment of the Dream Stele of Thutmosis IV, of the Story of King Cheops and the magicians, of the Argument between Apopi and Seqenenra and of the Teaching of Hordjedef
  4. Digital Egypt for Universities
    Excellent site, of the University College of London and Petrie Museum, and edited by Stephen Quirke, museum director. Selection of 22 hieroglyphic texts
  5. Cartigli.it
    This site, created by an Italian aficionado, presents the cartouches of Egyptian and Nubian sovereigns (Napata and Meroe), with transliteration and translation, from the Early Dynastic until the Roman Periods. The general information is however only indicative and somewhat imprecise
  6. Late Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egypt
    Site by Francesco Raffaele (University of Naples - L’Orientale) dedicated to Predynastic and Protodynastic Egypt, with interesting corpora of palettes, ivories and inscriptions on stone vessels; it also provides original studies and downloadable .pdf articles on the subject
  7. I Geroglifici ed Obelischi Eggizzi, 'opera postuma inedita di Pietro Bracci', 1767 – Griffith Institute, Oxford
    A few images from the rediscovered manuscript by Pietro Bracci (1700-1773), sculptor and versatile intellect of 18th-century Rome. The manuscript was purchased by Sir Alan H. Gardiner, then donated by him to the Ashmolean Museum library and finally moved to the Griffith Institute archive, where it is now located. It is an interesting example of the various attempts to decipher hieroglyphics in the pre-Champollion era.
  8. Potmark-Egypt.com - The International Potmark Workshop
    Database of Early Dynastic (Dynasties 0-2) ceramic markings with over 3,360 entries, organized by the international conference "Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egypt. Origin of the State," which brings together experts in the field.

  9. Sketchbooks of Gaston Maspero online - Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica)
    Sketchbooks containing epigraphic notes with copies of hieroglyphic inscriptions, Egyptian and Coptic papyri, drawings, sketches from monuments in Akhmim, Luxor, etc between 1881 and 1884
  10. Persons and Names of the Middle Kingdom
    Ongoing database on person names of the Middle Kingdom (late 11th–17th Dynasty) with a list of the hieroglyphic sources, titles and prosopography. This research project was originally funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.
  11. Pharaoh.se
    Amatorial site by Peter Lundtsröm on the names of the kings of ancient Egypt. It counts 2339 names (each sovereign could have up to five names, some of them changed names during their reign and significant variants are present). Besides the section on sources (Turin Royal Canon, Abydos Canon, Karnak Canon,etc.), the user can browse by reign in the section “Dynasties”. There are also: a part of the site on the works by Manetho from Sebennytos and the various witnesses, image galleries, a bibliography and other interesting tools.
  12. The Rosetta Stone online project
    Wordpress site by the ex Excellence Cluster TOPOI and by the Archaeological Department of the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin devoted to the trilingual text (Egyptian, Demotic, Greek) of the famous Memphis decree of Ptolemy V (known as the Rosetta Stone). The texts from the stone are annotated, transliterated and translated in German and English, but the section n Egyptian hieroglyphs does not appear to be active.
  13. Texts in Translation – Egypt at the Manchester Museum
    The “Texts in translation” section of the blog dedicated to the Egyptological collection of the Manchester Museum, edited by Campbell Rodger Price, up to now contains 18 papers concerning objects with hieroglyphic inscriptions (or, in one case, cursive hieroglyphic), which are illustrated and translated in English.

Institutions, centers for study and research

  1. Digital Karnak - UCLA
    The Digital Karnak Project was designed and built at the University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA) under the direction of Dr. Diane and Dr. Willeke Wendrich, with the supervision of an academic committee. It provides chronological interactive maps, short video documentaries, a rich archive of photographs with many thematic indexes, a Google Earth downloadable reconstruction of the temple, and a page of links to many institutions. Archived web pages.
  2. The Giza Archives - Boston Museum of Fine Arts
    Developed by The Museum of Fine Arts of Boston, this Web site is a comprehensive resource for research on Giza. It contains photographs and other documentation from the original Harvard University - Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition (1904 to 1947), from MFA fieldwork, and from other expeditions, museums, and universities around the world
  3. Theban Mapping Project - AUC
    Since 1978 the Theban Mapping Project has created a huge database of the Theban Necropolis (Thebes, now Luxor). The site focusses in particular on the Valley of the Kings, for which it provides an ample atlas. 3D reconstructions, photographs, a bibliography and information about the construction, discovery and work done by scholars over the centuries are available for each tomb
  4. Edfu Explorer Online (Edfu Project)
    The Edfu Explorer Online is a database offered by the Edfu Project of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. It includes the texts of the Edfu temple (the best preserved among Egyptian temples and the richest in Ptolemaic hieroglyphic inscriptions) - already published (Chassinat VII and VIII) with a new translation - a collection of images and an interactive plan of the temple. Requires user registration

  5. Karnak: Projet d'index global des inscriptions des temples de Karnak
    This project, coordinated by the Centre Franco-Égyptien d'Étude des Temples de Karnak with various grants, indexes inscriptions from the Karnak temple (currently just over 550 inscriptions out of over 3000 planned). It provides very detailed entries for many temple structures with photographs, facsimiles of texts and bibliography (some texts are available in PDF), as well as an interactive map
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  6. The Polychrome Hieroglyph Research Project
    Website by David Nunn (Université Libre de Bruxelles), on the artistic aspect of the Hieroglyphic writing system, with many examples organized by site, group, sign, period and colour. It also contains a bibliography, a palaeography and a diachronic study.

Academic materials

  1. CHAMPOLLION's Grammaire Egyptienne - The University of Chicago Library
    CHAMPOLLION J-F., Grammaire Egyptienne, Typographie de Firmin Didot Freres, Paris 1836. Dated, but of considerable historic interest; it was the first scholarly grammar dedicated to Ancient Egyptian.
  2. Wörterbuch der Ägyptische Sprache (1926-1953)
    The basic tool for any translation job on hieroglyphic texts, Adolf Erman and Hermann Grapow's Wörterbuch is a monumental work in several volumes that offers translations with examples of the entire ancient Egyptian language.
  3. Ägyptisches Handwörterbuch
    ERMAN A., GRAPOW H., Ägyptisches Handwörterbuch, 1921. Ed. by Joseph Serdult, Association Ménès - Association pour la promotion de l'informatique en Égyptologie
  4. The Beinlich wordlist
    New version of the list drawn up by the Egyptologists Horst Beinlich and Friedhelm Hoffmann, now on the site of the Egyptologist Nigel Strudwick. Provides the Egyptian word transliterated, a German translation, a brief reference to the Wörterbuch or to other publications.
  5. Diccionario Conciso de Jeroglificos
    Diccionario Conciso de Jeroglificos (Castilian translation of FAULKNER R., A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian).
  6. Ancient Egyptian Cooperative Electronic Dictionary
    A user-friendly cooperative dictionary with over 7000 entries in Hieroglyphic, with transliteration and English translation.
  7. Project Rosette - Dictionary
    A dictionary limited in number of entries and information. You can look up words in transliteration or Gardiner’s list code: a translation and hieroglyphics display is provided
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  8. Hieroglyphs step by step – Bibliotheca Alexandrina
    Bibliotheca Alexandrina created a webpage for learning Egyptian hieroglyphs through almost 30 lessons divided by topic, a dictionary, a photo gallery with transliterations and translations of Hieroglyphic texts and a section with electronic resources (rather general though).
  9. VéGA – Vocabulary of Ancient Egyptian
    A project for a Hieroglyphic Dictionary by the Paul Valéry University of Montpellier 3. The site is accessed by creating a free account. The dictionary provides a translation in French, English, German and Arabic, several attested spellings, bibliographical references and some commentary notes. Next to each lemma there is an indicator of the completeness of the entry.
  10. Hieroglyphic Egyptian: Language and Literature in the Middle Kingdom
    From the Daniel Selden page in academia.edu you can download the second edition of his Middle Kingdom grammar.
  11. Vocalized Dictionary of Ancient Egyptian
    From the Christian Tutundjian de Vartavan page in academia.edu you can download his vocalized dictionary of ancient Egypt (2016).
  12. Fabricius – Google Arts and Culture Lab Experiment
    Fabricius was launched in 2017 together with Assassin’s Creed Origins (Ubisoft) with the cooperation of international academic institutions. It uses machine learning to recognise, analyse and translate hieroglyphs texts. The site also includes a learn and a play section. The ambitious project aims at including other languages in the future.

Images

  1. Global Egyptian Museum
    Edited by Dirk van der Plas and Muhammad Saleh, the site strives to gather the highest number possible of images of objects from the many Egyptology collections in the world (it now contains 10,014 images). It is a long-term project under the auspices of the International Committee for Egyptology
  2. The Digital Library of Inscriptions and Calligraphies - Bibliotheca Alexandrina
    Photo galleries with brief (sometimes inaccurate) descriptive cards; inscriptions are organized by supports (architectural, textiles, jewelry, furniture, etc.) and not by writing system, but this is a good reason to browse through the galleries in search of Coptic, Demotic, Hieratic and Hieroglyphic inscriptions. Edited by the Library of Alexandria, which has become a center for digital humanities whose projects, however, do not always live up to expectations
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  3. MUDIRA Bilddatenbank - Munich Digital research Archive
    Joint project of the Instituts für Ägyptologie der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the Staatlichen Museums Ägyptischer Kunst München launched in spring 2012. It is a large database of annotated and professionally scanned images (about 30,000) taken in Egypt and of objects collected in museums.
  4. Cleo – The AI Egyptology Platform
    A searchable data bank containing more than 45,000 images of the Egyptian collections from four important international museums: the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. It is even possible to perform searches based on the images the user uploads.

Texts

  1. Catalog of Publications - Oriental Institute Library, Chicago University
    The Oriental Institute Library of Chicago University owns a number of titles, organized either by series or by subject, which can be purchased or are freely downloadable
  2. Champollion and Rosellini Egyptian Expeditions (Oxford Digital Library)
    The Digital Library of the Oxford University allows online consultation of two works of great vaue for the history of Egyptology. The works are: “Monumenti dell'Egitto e della Nubia” by I. Rosellini and “Monuments de l'Égypte et de la Nubie” and “Notices Descriptives” by J-F. Champollion, which is the result of the French-tuscan scientific expedition of 1828-1829 in Egypt and Nubia. The tables and texts in the two monumental works are still of great interest and use, and they quote hundreds of hieroglyphic texts
  3. A New Concordance of the Pyramid Texts
    The entire concordance of the Pyramid Texts, an accurate work by one of the most important scholars of texts from the Old Kingdom, J.P. Allen (ALLEN J.P., A New Concordance of the Pyramid Texts, Brown University, Providence 2013), is now available through the Oriental Institute in Chicago. The link provided here conveniently points to the AWOL page, which gathers all the six links.
  4. Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae
    The Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae, edited by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, in the verdion dated October 2012 includes about 1,100,000 words taken from a large number of ancient Egyptian texts. A free registration is required. The tool is extremely rich and allows individual lemmas to be searched by transliteration and translation, with examples and bibliographical references.
  5. Aegyptisches glossar
    ERMAN A., Aegyptisches glossar. Die häufigeren Worte der aegyptischen Sprache, Reuther & Reichard, Berlin 1904: available in various formats on the Internet Archive site
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  6. Some Values of Ptolemaic Signs
    DE WIT C., Some Values of Ptolemaic Signs, BIFAO 55 (1955), pp. 111-121: downloadable from the site of the Bulletin de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale (BIFAO)


  7. An Introduction to the Study of Ptolemaic Signs and their Values
    FAIRMAN H.W., An Introduction to the Study of Ptolemaic Signs and their Values, in BIFAO 43 (1945), pp. 51-138: downloadable from the site of Bulletin de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale (BIFAO)
  8. SETHE K., Dramatische Texte zu altägyptischen Mysterienspielen, I: Das "Denkmal memphitischer Theologie"
    SETHE K., Dramatische Texte zu altägyptischen Mysterienspielen, I: Das "Denkmal memphitischer Theologie". Der Schabakostein des Britischen Museums, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte und Altertumskunde Ägyptens 10.1, Leipzig 1928
  9. HERMANN A., Die Stelen der thebanischen Felsgräber der 18. Dynastie
    HERMANN A., Die Stelen der thebanischen Felsgräber der 18. Dynastie, Ägyptologische Forschungen 11, Glückstadt-Hamburg-New York 1940
  10. POLOTSKY J., Zu den Inschriften der 11. Dynastie
    POLOTSKY J., Zu den Inschriften der 11. Dynastie, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte und Altertumskunde Ägyptens 11, Leipzig 1929
  11. GRIFFITH F.Ll., A Collection of Hieroglyphs
    GRIFFITH F.Ll., A Collection of Hieroglyphs. A Contribution to the History of Egyptian Writing, Egypt Exploration Fund: Archaeological Survey of Egypt, London 1898
  12. KOEFOED-PETERSEN O., Recueil des inscriptions hiéroglyphiques de la Glyptothèque Ny Carlsberg
    KOEFOED-PETERSEN O., Recueil des inscriptions hiéroglyphiques de la Glyptothèque Ny Carlsberg, Bibliotheca Aegyptiaca 6, Bruxelles 193
  13. SANDMAN M., Texts from the Time of Akhenaten
    SANDMAN M., Texts from the Time of Akhenaten, Bibliotheca Aegyptiaca 8, Bruxelles 1938
  14. PIERRET P., Études égyptologiques comprenant le texte et la traduction d'une stèle éthiopienne inédite
    PIERRET P., Études égyptologiques comprenant le texte et la traduction d'une stèle éthiopienne inédite et de divers manuscrits religieux avec un glossaire égyptien-grec du décret de Canope, Études Égyptologiques 1, Paris 1873
  15. PIERRET P., Recueil d'inscriptions inédites du Musée Égyptien du Louvre 1
    PIERRET P., Recueil d'inscriptions inédites du Musée Égyptien du Louvre, première partie, Études Égyptologiques 2, Paris 1874
  16. PIERRET P., Recueil d'inscriptions inédites du Musée Égyptien du Louvre 2
    PIERRET P., Recueil d'inscriptions inédites du Musée Égyptien du Louvre, deuxième partie, Études Égyptologiques 8, Paris 1878
  17. CLÈRE J.J., J. VANDIER, Textes de la première période intermédiaire et de la XIème dynastie
    CLÈRE J.J., J. VANDIER, Textes de la première période intermédiaire et de la XIème dynastie, Ier fascicule, Bibliotheca Aegyptiaca 10, Bruxelles 1948
  18. Hieroglyphic Texts from Egyptian Stelae, &c., in the British Museum [HTBM]
    From the "Brunner Digital Collection" of Macquarie University, links to Internet Archive and other sites by the Egyptologists Electronic Forum (EEF).
  19. Dendara XIII-XV Online
    Edition of the hieroglyphic texts from the temple of Dendera by Sylvie Cauville (Edition IFAO): the volumes XIII, XIV and XV are on-line. Link to the volumes on the AWOL site (Ancient World On-Line)
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  20. HAYS H.M., The Organization of the Pyramid Texts
    HAYS H.M., The Organization of the Pyramid Texts, 2 vol., Brill 2012. On-line on Brill's website.

Fonts

  1. JSesh, an Open Source Hieroglyphic Editor
    Free downloadable program for composing Hieroglyphic text. It is continuously updated and is highly versatile as it allows text to be written in Latin alphabet, hieroglyphic, and transcription. The choice of signs is intuitive as it uses Gardiner's list. Registration, which is free and not mandatory, provides access to the forum. Users can also edit signs themselves.

  2. Tksesh
    TKSesh was created by the same author of JSesh. It is a hieroglyphic database, dictionary and text editor: user-friendly, it allows among other things to compose hieroglyphic texts and to export the file as an image
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  3. HieroTeX
    Hieroglyphic text composition package for LaTeX: it offers a large set of different fonts and styles, as well as a tool for editing individual hieroglyphic signs.
  4. Font per la traslitterazione del geroglifico - IFAO
    Font for the transliteration of hieroglyphic used by the editions of the Institut français d'archéologie orientale in Cairo.
  5. Hieroglyphic Pro/Desk
    Desktop version of an IOS application for the translation of signs and words from hieroglyphics to English and vice-versa.
  6. Hieroglyphic Everywhere Project
    This blog by Bob Richmond, devoted to the worldwide digital diffusion of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Many papers deal with topics connected to the standard Unicode encoding, to digital paleography, to fonts and applications for writing in hieroglyphics.
  7. Hieroglyphica
    A free hieroglyphic word processor in vector mode, released in 2021. The text is composed by searching for the signs (by code, name or transliteration) and then by drag-and-dropping the hieroglyphs and, when necessary, by grouping the signs. Texts can be saved in format XML.

Museums and collections

  1. Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology - UCL
    University museum at University College, London, the museum was created in 1892 with the donation of Amelia Edwards (1831-1892) and considerably expanded with the materials found by W. M. Flinders Petrie (1853-1942). The catalogue, including photos of the objects, can be fully searched online
  2. DVCTVS - [Spanish] National Papyrological Funds
    Portal dedicated to a digital catalogue and to online publications of papyri from Spanish collections. The work is being continuously updated and, as of now, only parts of the following collections have been digitized: Montserrat Abbey, Palau-Ribes and Pastor Foundation. Through the search function you can find documents in Coptic (search option for individual dialects), Demotic, Hieratic, and Hieroglyphic, as well as many other languages (Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac)
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  3. Musée Champollion des Ecritures du Monde
    Site of the Museum dedicated to the decipherer of hieroglyphs in his hometown of Figeac. There is a biographical sketch devoted to Champollion with a video and some educational pages devoted to writing systems in the world and to the museum's collections

  4. Papyrus Portal
    A database that allows users to search all digitized papyrological collections in Germany in a uniform and standardized way. The included collections are those of Berlin, Bonn, Bremen, Erlangen, Giessen, Halle, Heidelberg, Jena, Cologne, Leipzig, Trier, and Würzburg. It is possible to search papyri by language, including Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, Demotic, and Coptic.
  5. Turin Papyrus Online Platform
    Catalogue of the papyrological collection of the Museo Egizio in Turin, with comprehensive entries, high-resolution images and a user-friendly and effective search tool. Only one papyrus, with a royal cartouche and a depiction of Ramses IX, is currently included.

Collections of texts and digital libraries

  1. Hieroglyphic and Hieratic Papyri (HHP)
    Hieroglyphic and Hieratic Papyri (HHP) is an online database of metadata. Its aim is to provide information about all published, semi-published as well as some unpublished texts written in these two scripts (excluding Abnormal Hieratic), currently some 1520 items.
  2. Trismegistos
    An interdisciplinary portal of papyrological and epigraphical resources dealing with Egypt and the Nile valley between roughly 800 BC and AD 800. There are very rich databases of metadata on papyrus and parchment.
  3. Corpus of Ptolemaic Inscriptions (CPI)
    This site, edited by Oxford University, gathers all the Greek, bilingual and trilingual inscriptions from Ptolemaic Egypt. The corpus is divided into three volumes on a geographical basis: the first covers the region of Alexandria and the Delta sites, the second covers the Fayum, Middle and Upper Egypt and the third includes the Southern border, the Oases and the inscriptions of uncertain date/provenance. As far as the first volume is concerned, each inscription includes an image and the text translation. Links to the database Trismegistos are also provided.

Bibliography

  1. Online Egyptological Bibliography - Griffith Institute, University of Oxford
    For-pay, it is an indispensable tool for bibliographic research in Egyptology. It includes 100,000 Egyptological titles, combined with other bibliographic tools such as the Annual Egyptological Bibliography (AEB), Bibliographie Altägypten (BA), and the Aigyptos database. It holds virtually anything published on ancient Egypt from 1822 to the present with daily updates 

  2. Glyphs and Grammars - Part I: Resources for beginners
    Edited by Aayko Eyma, moderator of the Egyptologist's Electronic Forum (EEF)
  3. Glyphs and Grammars - Part II: Advanced resources
    Edited by Aayko Eyma, moderator of the Egyptologist's Electronic Forum (EEF).
  4. ABZU
    Database for the research of periodicals and monographs of Egyptological and Near-Eastern interests, edited by Charles E. Jones, Head Librarian of the Blegen Library at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.
  5. Propylaeum
    Propylaeum (University of Heidelberg) offers several search options for finding subject-information about Egyptology, including the chance to search for printed monographs and journal articles from Germany or world-wide. Also offered is the use of an electronic document-delivery (journal articles via E-mail / book loans) and access to lists of newly published literature. Users have in addition access to various forms of electronic media including subject databases, E-Journals, freely-available Internet sources, direct access to digitized historical literature and a document server (which permits the free publication of monographs or articles).
  6. On-line Egyptological Bibliographies, Databases, Search Engines, and Other Resources (EEF)
    by Aayko Eyma, moderator of Egyptologyst's Electronic Forum (EEF).
  7. Digitized Collections of Ancient Egyptian Source Texts - EEF
    by Aayko Eyma, moderator of Egyptologist's Electronic Forum (EEF).
  8. THOT – A Bibliography on Ancient Egyptian and Related Subjects
    A bibliography updated up to 2014, taken from the Academia.edu page of Christian Tutundjian de Vartavan.