Persons and Names of the Middle Kingdom

The database "Persons and Names of the Middle Kingdom" (PNM) is developed as part of the projects "Umformung und Variabilität im Korpus altägyptischer Personennamen 2055–1550 v. Chr." and  “Altägyptische Titel in amtlichen und familiären Kontexten, 2055-1352 v. Chr.”. The database includes data on Egyptian Middle Kingdom personal names, people, written sources, titles, and dossiers of persons attested in various sources.

The online version of the database is published at https://pnm.uni-mainz.de/info. The source code of the web-interface is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1418714.

Version 3 covers the entire timeframe of the Middle Kingdom and the Second Intermediate Period. It comparison to version 2, it introduces changes to the database structure and the web-interface and includes the hieroglyphic renderings of age epithets and classifiers (the latter only for a part of the dataset). Older versions of the database have been converted to the new database format, but their data remains intact.

It lacks the German translations of personal names and translations of titles. Some material could not be accessed because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The translations and the classification of personal names are still preliminary. The coverage of titles is currently limited to a list of titles occurring in sources (excluding epithets) and a cross index to Ward’s and Fischer’s handbooks of Middle Kingdom titles. Titles will be further analysed during my new project starting soon, which will also address early 18th Dynasty material; then their translations and a classification will be added. Some occasional First Intermediate Period sources are also included in the database, but no attempt was made to cover them systematically.

The release includes the dump of the MySQL database (tested with MariaDB 10.3.31), the description of the database structure, the graphic representations of spellings, created with JSesh, and RDF representations of the dataset in the Turtle and RDF/XML notations. Additionally it includes the ontology developed for this dataset (https://pnm.uni-mainz.de/ontology/) and R2RML mappings for transforming the MySQL database to RDF. A live SPARQL interface to the RDF version of the dataset can be found at https://pnm.uni-mainz.de/sparql.