Ancient Egyptian

The language spoken in ancient Egypt was a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. The earliest known complete written sentence in the Egyptian language has been dated to about 2690 BCE, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known, along with Sumerian. Egyptian was spoken until the late seventeenth century in the form of Coptic. (Source: Wikipedia)

Important

For correct visualisation of transliterated Unicode text you will probably need a special font. We recommend either egyptoserif (handles the yod better) or noto.

Transliterate MdC

MdC (Manuel de Codage) is the standard encoding scheme and a series of conventions for transliterating egyptian texts. At first it was also conceived as a system to represent positional relations between hieroglyphic signs. However it was soon realised that the scheme used by MdC was not really appropriate for this last task. Hence the current softwares for hieroglyphic typesetting use often slightly different schemes than MdC. For more on MdC, see here and here

Transliteration conventions proposed by MdC are widely accepted though. Since at that time the transliteration conventions of the egyptology were not covered by the Unicode, MdC’s all-ascii proposition made it possible to exchange at least transliterations in digital environement. It is the de facto transliteration system used by Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae which includes transliterations from several different scripts used in Ancient Egypt: a good discussion can be found here

Here are the unicode equivalents of MdC transliteration scheme as it is represented in transliterate_mdc:

Note

reStructuredText tables cannot display all characters in the Character column. The several that cannot be displayed are: U+0056: ; U+003c: ; U+003e: ; U+0024, U+00a3: .

MdC Unicode
Unicode Number | Character Unicode Number | Character
U+0041 A U+a723
U+0061 a U+a725
U+0048 H U+1e25
U+0078 x U+1e2b
U+0058 X U+1e96
U+0056 V U+0068+U+032d See note
U+0053 S U+0161 š
U+0063 c U+015b ś
U+0054 T U+1e6f
U+0076 v U+1e71
U+0044 D U+1e0f
U+0069 i U+0069+U+0486 i҆ |
U+003d = U+2e17
U+003c < U+2329 See note
U+003e > U+232a See note
U+0071 q U+1e33
U+0051 Q U+1e32
U+00a1, U+0040 ¡, @ U+1e24
U+0023, U+00a2 #, ¢ U+1e2a
U+0024, U+00a3 $, £ U+0048 + U+0331 See note
U+00a5, U+005e ¥, ^ U+0160 Š
U+00a9, U+002b ©, + U+1e0e
U+0043 C U+015a Ś
U+002a, U+00a7 *, § U+1e6e

The Unicode still doesn’t cover all of the transliteration conventions used within the egyptology, but there has been a lot of progress. Only three characters are now problematic and are not covered by precomposed characters of the Unicode Consortium.

  • Egyptological Yod
  • Capital H4
  • Small and Capital H5: almost exclusively used for transliterating demotic script.

The function is created in the view of transliteration font provided by CCER which maps couple of extra characters to transliterated equivalents such as ‘¡’ or ‘@’ for Ḥ.

There is also a q_kopf flag for choosing between the ‘q’ or ‘ḳ’ at the resulting text.

Usage:

Import the function:

In [1]: from cltk.corpus.egyptian.transliterate_mdc import mdc_unicode

Take a MdC encoded string (P.Berlin 3022:28-31):

In [1]: mdc_string = """rdi.n wi xAst n xAst
fx.n.i r kpny Hs.n.i r qdmi
ir.n.i rnpt wa gs im in wi amw-nnSi
HqA pw n rtnw Hrt"""

Ensure that mdc_string is encoded in Unicode characters (this is mostly unnecessary):

In [2]: mdc_string.encode().decode("utf-8")
Out[6]:
''rdi.n wi xAst n xAst\nfx.n.i r kpny Hs.n.i r qdmi\nir.n.i rnpt wa gs im in wi amw-nnSi\nHqA pw n rtnw Hrt''

Apply the function to obtain the Unicode map result:

In [10]: unicode_string = mdc_unicode(mdc_string)
In [11]: print(unicode_string)
rdi҆.n wi҆ ḫꜣst n ḫꜣst
fḫ.n.i҆ r kpny ḥs.n.i҆ r qdmi҆
i҆r.n.i҆ rnpt wꜥ gs i҆m i҆n wi҆ ꜥmw-nnši҆
ḥqꜣ pw n rtnw ḥrt

If you disable the option q_kopf, the result would be following:

In [136]: unicode_string = mdc_unicode(mdc_string, q_kopf=False)

In [152]: print(unicode_string)
rdi҆.n wi҆ ḫꜣst n ḫꜣst
fḫ.n.i҆ r kpny ḥs.n.i҆ r ḳdmi҆
i҆r.n.i҆ rnpt wꜥ gs i҆m i҆n wi҆ ꜥmw-nnši҆
ḥḳꜣ pw n rtnw ḥrt

Notice the q -> ḳ transformation.

If you are going to pass a string object read from a file be sure to precise the encoding during the opening of the file:

with open("~/mdc_text.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    mdc_text = f.read()
    unicode_text = mdc_unicode(mdc_text)

Notice encoding=”utf-8”.

TODO

  • Add support for different transliteration systems used within egyptology.
  • Add an option to for i -> j transformation for facilitating computer based operations.
  • Add support for the problematic characters in future.