Digital projects on earlier Egyptian mortuary texts at the University of Alcalá
This paper presents five interrelated digital projects on earlier Egyptian mortuary texts written in the hieroglyphic script and conducted at Universidad de Alcalá since 2019. The MORTEXVAR project (2019-2024) features the beta version of a database of the Middle Kingdom mortuary texts accessible on...
| Autores: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | libro |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2026 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Alcalá (UAH) |
| Repositorio: | e_Buah Biblioteca Digital Universidad de Alcalá |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:dnet:ebuahbibliot::887589305e49cb3730c0aa2e4b8dae5c |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10017/69181 https://dx.doi.org/10.6093/978-88-6719-368-4 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | OCR Hieroglyphs Coffin texts Pyramid texts Earlier Egyptian mortuary texts Historia History |
| Sumario: | This paper presents five interrelated digital projects on earlier Egyptian mortuary texts written in the hieroglyphic script and conducted at Universidad de Alcalá since 2019. The MORTEXVAR project (2019-2024) features the beta version of a database of the Middle Kingdom mortuary texts accessible on the Internet, an international conference plus collective volume on variability, a monograph on the variability of the Coffin Text spells, and a doctoral thesis on some fifty Coffin Text ensembles (coffin sets plus eventually burial chambers). The OCR-PT-CT project (2022) created and developed a digital toolset to perform optical character recognition (OCR) of the dataset available from the standard editions of the Pyramid Texts (PT) and the Coffin Texts (CT) to provide a semi-automatic transcription of the original text into Manuel de Codage (MdC). The resulting transcriptions are organised according to text paragraphs, spells and witnesses into a CSV file ready to be integrated with the MORTEXVAR project dataset. The recognition of hieroglyphs is based on the YOLOv3 network, which has been trained for that purpose with real and synthetic data. The TTAE project (2024) is the second phase of the OCR-PT-CT project; it proposes a semi-automatic transliteration by matching transliteration strings from the MORTEXVAR database with images from the CT publication (vols. I-II), some 4,000 image samples in all. This line of action will be furthered by the TM-CT project (2024-2026), extending the transliteration strings to the whole corpus (CT I-VIII) to make a much larger sample available for OCR. Complementarily, the T3D project (2025) will provide our research with a comprehensive catalogue of Middle Kingdom mortuary documents, mainly wooden coffins. This project will merge the archaeological information with the philological information obtained from the other projects, opening the possibility of creating 3D models of those documents. The research line implemented through these five projects has two aims: to accelerate the access of the research community to the most extensive corpus of texts ever written in Earlier Egyptian with a powerful tool that will permit the conduct of large-scale and in-depth analyses on graphemics, morphology, syntax and semantics, as well as interdisciplinary studies in history, religion, anthropology and archaeology; and give these texts universal access through the Internet following the basic principle of open science. |
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