Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
The Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae on the Internet
Description and organization
The Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae is a publication platform made available on the Internet by the Project Structure and Transformation in the Vocabulary of the Egyptian Language (former Ancient Egyptian Dictionary Project) at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Within the Thesaurus, a digital corpus of Egyptian (including Demotic) texts have been released to the public for computer-assisted search. Lemmatization and morpho-syntactic annotation of the text material allow for specific research from lexical, philological, linguistic, and historico-cultural points of view. All texts come with running translations to assist particularly non-specialists and scholars of neighbouring disciplines in their work.
The digital text corpus, forming the substance of this information system, is the result of years of ongoing cooperation among several projects, and will continue developing on this basis. Contributions have been made by the Project Structure and Transformation in the Vocabulary of the Egyptian Language (former Ancient Egyptian Dictionary Project) at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Saxonian Academy of Sciences ans Humanities in Leipzi. The now finished projects Demotic Text Database Project of the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz (Wuerzburg branch), Book of the Dead Project of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts (Bonn) and « Digital Heka » has been involved from the very beginning. Since 2005, the Leuven Online Index of Ptolemaic and Roman Hieroglyphic Texts Project of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven has been involved. Since October 2012 texts of the Horus temple of the Edfu Project have been integrated. This cooperation was promoted by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. The origin and concept of this Internet publication have largely been informed by this cooperation. It is the purpose of the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae to make available, in the form of a virtual dictionary, a new and, within Egyptology novel, tool for lexicographic research into the Egyptian language. In this sense, the project closely follows both purpose and method of the comprehensive Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, which Adolf Erman inaugurated at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1897, making it a success story. As a token of admiration for this outstanding researcher, not least in the field of Egyptian lexicography, the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae was first released for general use on 31 October 2004 – the 150th birth anniversary of Adolf Erman
(Text by the organizers)
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