Ancient Egyptian Hieratic Palaeography Database: AKU-PAL

Ancient Egyptian civilization, which flourished in the Nile Valley and the Nile Delta, is widely known for its monumental hieroglyphs (sacred carvings) used in temples, tombs, and on stelae. In addition to these hieroglyphs, however, there was also an early cursive system for writing with ink and brush mainly on papyri and ostraca, called hieratic (see Figure 1). This script was used for approximately 3,000 years.

This is an extended and modified English version of a Japanese article in the Jimbunjohogaku Geppo [Digital Humanities Monthly] web magazine (ISSN 2189-1621 / Founded August 27, 2011, Circulation 1,083), No. 145-1, published by the International Institute for Digital Humanities, Tokyo, on August 31, 2023; an archived version: https://www.dhii.jp/DHM/dhm145-1; the registration to the web magazine: https://w.bme.jp/bm/p/f/tf.php?id=dhm&task=regist.

Figure 1: Hieratic papyrus fragment from the New Kingdom, Ramesside period (Dynasty 20, reign of Ramesses III, ca. 1183 BCE). Likely from Memphis in Egypt, this ink on papyrus document measures 35 × 39 cm. Now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (O.C.3569), Public Domain, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/549250.

I attended the 13th International Congress for Egyptologists (ICE XIII), held from August 5 to 12, 2023, at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where I participated in presentations on various Egyptology-related Digital Humanities (DH) projects. A vast number of ongoing and newly launched DH projects were introduced at the event. Among them, two presentations stood out for demonstrating remarkable progress in AKU-PAL, an initiative developed by the Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz, in cooperation with Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, and Technische Universität Darmstadt.

AKU-PAL is the online platform of the AKU project. AKU is an acronym for “Altägyptische Kursivschriften” (Old Egyptian Cursive Scripts) in German. This long-term project started in 2015 and is planned to go on until 2037. The project is preparing the first digital palaeography of hieratic and cursive hieroglyphs and is carrying out systematic analyses. The digital palaeography catalogs hieratic signs—selected from a broad corpus of sources—ranging from around 2700 BCE to about 300 CE, while also considering region, genre, and writing materials (papyrus, ostraca, linen, leather, wood, clay, stone, etc.).

The open-access AKU-PAL platform uses a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows users to view and compare hieratic sign forms for each hieroglyph across different texts, scribes, regions, and periods. Currently the platform is only available in German, with an English version in development. Below is a brief explanation of how to use it. 

On the AKU-PAL homepage, you will see four red tiles labeled “Grapheme,” “Datierungen,” “Schriftträger,” and “Texte” (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: An example page displaying the hieratic signs corresponding to AKU number 0100 (MdC A5) from the Grapheme list.

Grapheme (Script Sign/Character): When you click “Grapheme,” you will see a list of hieroglyphs. Clicking on any single hieroglyph brings up images of corresponding hieratic or cursive hieroglyphs, which have been extracted from various original texts. Notably, the hieroglyph list here differs from the traditional Gardiner’s Sign List commonly used in Egyptology. Compared to Gardiner’s list, the AKU sign list is more systematically organized and includes many variant signs from different periods that are not found in Gardiner’s list.

Datierungen (Dating): Clicking “Datierungen” brings up tiles labeled with chronological periods—some broadly, like “Altes Reich” (Old Kingdom), and others more specifically, such as “Mittleres Reich, 12. Dynastie, Amenemhet I.” (Middle Kingdom, 12th Dynasty, Amenemhat I.). Each tile displays bibliographical information about sources from that period. The granularity varies from general to more detailed (e.g., the name of a specific dynasty), depending on the sources. These hieratic documents are the texts from which the AKU data is drawn. Clicking on any one of them takes you to metadata about that text.

Schriftträger (Writing Surface/Material): Clicking “Schriftträger” displays information on the material on which these texts were written (papyrus, stone, wood, etc.) and the location where they were written, along with relevant metadata.

Texte (Texts): Clicking “Texte” shows all documents in tiles labeled with each text’s title and genre. You can filter these documents by period, region, and writing medium.

AKU-PAL offers six search options in “Grapheme”. You can search by the widely used Manuel de Codage (MdC) encoding for hieroglyphs, by the unique AKU numbering system, dating, sign category and more. Additionally, if you go to the “Grapheme” tile and then click on a hieroglyph, you can see a variety of hieratic signs corresponding to that sign. These signs are arranged chronologically. Clicking on one of these images opens a page (see Figure 3) where you can view a high-resolution scan or an SVG vector image. You can also see metadata about the document from which that specific sign was extracted.

Figure 3: Upper part of the page for Hieratogramm number 5091).

For example, the scan of the hieratogram in Figure 3 is taken from Georg Möller’s Hieratische Paläographie. The document containing this particular character is housed in the British Museum under inventory number EA10490. Under the AKU numbering system, this character is listed as A0100, and in MdC it is A5. Since the AKU number can change, the graphemes as well as the individual hieratic signs should be cited by their permanent ID, here GR 34 and HT 5091 respectively (cf. the FAQ page). Every page gives the citation link with the relevant ID (see Figure 3). This sign belongs to the broad category “A – Männer und anthropomorphe Götter” (“A – Male Humans and Anthropomorphic Male Gods”), the subcategory “sitzend od. stehend – mit Attribut” (“seated or standing – with an attribute”), and is described as “sich unter Mauerecke verbergend” (“hidden under a corner of a wall”).

Figure 4: Lower part of the page for Hieratogramm number 5091

Below that, as shown in Figure 4, you can see details such as the sign’s size and its dating (here, 21st Dynasty of the Third Intermediate Period).

Each extracted image in AKU-PAL carries specific license information. If you plan to reuse an image in an article or another database, pay attention to the license indicated. The sign shown in Figures 3 and 4, for instance, is provided under a CC-BY 4.0 license, meaning it may be reused as long as the original author is properly credited.

The project also links to external databases and printed palaeographies from each Grapheme including the following large online platforms:

• The Demotic Palaeographical Database Project (DPDP), an old-script demotic database,
• Thot Sign List, a hieroglyph sign-list database,
• A Palaeography of Polychrome Hieroglyphs, a database of polychrome hieroglyphs,
• Hieratische Paläographie DB, a web application version of Georg Möller’s Hieratische Paläographie.

The platform continues to develop: AKU is currently working on compatibility with IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework). Moreover, one of the presentations demonstrated how the project LaTeX-paleography (developed by T. Konrad) can visually arrange selected hieratograms in chronological order in an elegant layout for PDF or printed versions. The project is planned to continue until 2037, and the team is currently developing Version 1.4.

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Acknowledgements: Svenja Gülden and Prof. Ursula Verhoeven from the AKU project for checking this article

At the ICE XIII, there were many other noteworthy DH presentations beyond AKU. Another important development was the decision and unveiling of the Leiden Unified Transliteration / Transcription (LUT), aimed at standardizing the Latin-based consonantal transcriptions (“transliteration” in Egyptology), which had previously varied widely across different Egyptological studies and DH projects. In this new system, Gardiner’s sign Z4, often written as “y” or “j,” is written as ï, following Werning (2015) and others—thus distinguishing it from M17 (written in LUT with a dot under i, ı͗) and M17a (written as y).