Ancient Egyptian Technology
Hieroglyphs, Hieratic, Transliteration
Unicode, EGPZ, XML

Unicode and Egyptian

Unicode is an industry standard for the representation of text and symbols in digital form. The Unicode Consortium (www.unicode.org) is a non-profit organization that manages the development of the standard. Unicode 1.0 was published in 1991 and improvements and extensions have been made in periodic revisions, the most recent of which is Unicode 5.0 (November 2006). The character repertoire of Unicode is coordinated with the Universal Character Set standard (ISO/IEC 10646): the code points and character names are identical for corresponding revisions but Unicode adds character properties and rules beyond ISO 10646.

All modern computer operating systems (such as Linux, MacOS, Solaris and Windows) and many applications support Unicode to some degree, indeed Unicode is now generally accepted as the primary and preferred encoding for text. XML and modern versions of HTML use Unicode. Nevertheless it often takes several years for a new version of Unicode to gain widespread support and software will not necessarily implement all Unicode functionality even at the revision it is working to.

The goal of a universal character set is to encode all scripts, ancient and modern. Unicode 4.1 improved the situation with Coptic through disunification from Greek. Unicode 5.0 added new scripts Phoenician and Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform. Progress is being made with Egyptian Transliteration and Hieroglyphs.

Egyptian Transliteration in Unicode

Computer software for Egyptian has long used a transliteration convention in which ASCII letters are used rather than the diacritics and special characters Alef and Ayin traditionally used by Egyptologists. The Unicode Technical Committee agreed in November 2005 to accept a proposal to include upper and lower case Egyptological Alef and Ain characters in Unicode. These will be released with Unicode 5.1 (currently in Beta, release expected March 2008). The situation with Yod is not clear yet (for writers who don't use the plain 'i' or 'j' convention) but the remaining characters are already available given suitable font support.

See N2241: Proposal to add 6 Egyptological characters to the UCS (PDF, Michael Everson, 2000) for a rationale for the inclusion of Alef, Ayin and Yod in Unicode. Also see Representing Transliteration of Ancient Egyptian in Unicode (PDF, Donald Mastronarde, 2005).

Egyptian Hieroglyphs in Unicode

The 1063 hieroglyphs given in N3237: Proposal to encode Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the SMP of the UCS were accepted for encoding in the Universal Character Set by the ISO WG2 meeting in April 2007. This set is based on the works of Alan Gardiner, the majority of which hieroglyphs are given in his work Egyptian Grammar. Some minor changes were made to the initial proposal and the set accepted by WG2 in first national ballot on ISO 10646 PDAM5 (September 2007) now numbers 1071 (see N3349: Summary of repertoire for FPDAM 5 of ISO/IEC 10646:2003 and future amendments). A second national ballot on PDAM5 is expected April 2008 at which time the set is likely to be fixed. All being well, Basic Egyptian Hieroglyphs will then be released with Unicode 5.2 ( expected 2009/10).

 Further work is expected to result in additions to this basic set of hieroglyphs in later versions of the standard. Indeed it is desirable for scholarly purposes that this process begins in 2008.

A proposal for a well-defined use of the Unicode Private Zones for encoding Egyptian Hieroglyphs (EGPZ - EGyptian in the Unicode Private Zones) was made in 2005 before work recommenced on formal standards work. This has been revised in 2007 to complement the formal standard. EGPZ 1.0 was released in November 2007, following incorporation of expert feedback. See the EGPZ 1.0 page on this site.

A short history of Egyptian Hieroglyphs in Unicode

The sometime inclusion of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs in Unicode and the ISO Universal Character Set has been on the agenda since the early work on Unicode 1.0. Indeed the cover art of the Unicode 1.0 book showed the Rossetta Stone despite the fact that two out of three of the scripts were not yet under direct consideration for encoding. The first formal discussion document on the subject was that of Michael Everson (N1636, 1997) which was elaborated and detailed in a later document (N1944, 1999) with a character set based on Hieroglyphica (1993) and control codes from Manuel de Codage (MdC, 1988). The consensus at that time was that questions of glyph variant vs. character needed resolution and the control codes of MdC were inappropriate in the Unicode philosophy. A less ambitious approach of limiting an initial repertoire to the widely used 'Gardiner Set' from Egyptian Grammar and related works gained favour at this time.

Work began in 2005 on defining a 'Gardiner Set' of basic hieroglyphs for inclusion in the Universal Character Set with the backing of the Script Encoding Initiative and Unicode Consortium. A draft was presented at the Oxford meeting of Informatique et Egyptologie in August 2006 where the approach taken was generally supported by experts in the user community. Feedback from I&E was presented to the Unicode Technical Committee meeting in October 2006 and a proposal made to the WG2 meeting in April 2007.

 

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