Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

Computer-assisted approaches to text and language, referred to as computational linguistics, represent a developing field in Egyptology. One of the main concerns has been and continues to be the encoding of hieroglyphic signs for computers. The historical standard in this respect is the Manuel de Codage; a Unicode encoding has also been recently developed. Computer-assisted approaches also provide helpful tools notably for creating, annotating, and exploiting text databases. After pioneering work in the 1960s, a number of large text databases have been developed since the 1990s, for example, the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae or the “projet Ramsès.” Ongoing projects involve automated text processing and analysis for Egyptian, especially automated transliteration, part-of-speech tagging, and optical character recognition.