Introduction to the Hieroglyphs Everywhere Project

The Hieroglyphs Everywhere Project is an initiative to help make the Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic writing system widely accessible and useable over the whole range of modern digital devices, applications and web sites.

The name 'Hieroglyphs Everywhere' originates from the title of my presentation to the meeting of Informatique et Egyptologie, Oxford way back in 2006. Michael Everson and myself were present at the meeting to elaborate on the potential benefits of Unicode for Egyptology and discuss in detail our proposal to add basic Egyptian Hieroglyph characters to the Unicode Standard.

These 1071 Egyptian Hieroglyph characters became part of the Unicode Standard in 2009 with the release of Unicode 5.2. Web browser and other application support for the new Unicode features slowly perculated into the digital landscape so now hieroglyph characters are indeed widely available on many modern devices from phones, tablets, desktop/laptop PCs and even video games consoles.

However there is more to a writing system than characters. Hieroglyphs were and are written in groups, not one after the other:

Five years after the characters became available in Unicode it made sense to take the next step to enable grouping of hieroglyphs in Unicode Plain Text so hieroglyphic can be used as a fully functional writing system. This step is a topic for a future blog post but in short the necessary additions were proposed last year and are now recommended for inclusion in Unicode 10 (release Summer 2017), subject to consultation with national standards bodies.

Hieroglyphic can be of casual interest, feature as a small part of a young persons education or simply used for fun. At the other end of the scale there are exacting requirements of Egyptologists and other scholars or students of Ancient Egypt.

To bring hieroglyphic to life is a fairly demanding task. There need to be suitable fonts, tools for working with hieroglyphs and resources, topics to feature in this blog. Producers of web browsers, Operating Systems and office software need encouragement and support if we are to avoid repeating the slow rate of progress after Unicode 2009.

As the first output of the project, some technical resources including reference fonts are being published on www.egpz.org to help working with Unicode elements not in the standard. Such as an additional 5000 specialized hieroglyphs. The aim is to complete this rollout by end of the month.

The www.hieroglyphseverywhere.net web site is also under construction during the next month to set the scene for what is needed and provide some example material. Right now there are no timescales beyond this goal although it is highly desirable to make solid progress by the time Unicode 10 goes into Beta at the end of the year.

Offers of support to help move HEP forward would be greatly appreciated.

𓋹𓍑𓋴

Bob Richmond