Ancient Egyptian Hieratic Script - Aspects of Digital Paleography for a NLS

The project aims to provide an online database and tool for paleographic research of ancient Egyptian cursive scripts (Gülden et al., 2017; Gerhards et al., 2018). In addition to the monumental hieroglyphs, different cursive scripts were used over approximately 3000 years. The so-called Hieratic Script was used for various genres such as literary, religious and administrative texts. Hieratic could be written with ink on papyrus, leather, wooden panels or other materials and even be carved in stone. The approximately 600-700 individual characters of the script can vary immense in their graphical appearance.

Until now, there are no satisfactory OCR techniques or any other pattern recognition tools that can be used for hieratic script. Therefore, we need other digital methods and formats to detect similar signs and analyze the script.

In the first workshop session, we would like to show the first steps of our workflow beginning with digitizing the ancient Egyptian sources, recording the single signs in the database with links to metadata and in connection to other characters, working our way up to/and ending with preparing the data for digital analysis and a repository.
In the second part we will present preliminary methods for analyzing raster as well as vector graphics. Furthermore, we would like to discuss the needs of projects that deal with similar paleographic questions of NLS and the possibilities of data structure, analysis, front end visualization and the data repository.