Hieroglyphs on the web: The Digital Topographical Bibliography

The Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Statues, Reliefs and Paintings (Topographical Bibliography or TopBib for short) is a long running project (work began in the early 20th Century) based at the Griffith Institute, Oxford. The first part of Volume I of the Bibliography - THE THEBAN NECROPOLIS PART 1. PRIVATE TOMBS - was published in 1927. Since then new volumes and revised versions have been published.

The first seven printed volumes of TopBib followed the Topographical approach. The more recent Volume VIII - OBJECTS OF PROVIDENCE NOT KNOWN (2000-) instead, for obvious reasons, organises objects by type and period.

A brief  History of the Topographical Bibliography is available on the Griffith Institute website.

TopBib is the essential and definitive resource concerning Ancient Egyptian objects.

Behind the printed volumes, modern technology was introduced to TopBib during the editorship of Jaromir Malek with use of databases for digitised versions of the text, hieroglyph encodings and so forth. Some material was made available on the web and the notion of an online version of the Bibliography devised. Aside from the benefits of making digitised material available to scholars, technology helps work on TopBib to continue more efficiently (there is a large amount of material available yet to be analysed and published).

The Digital Topographical Bibliography currently provides access to the printed editions (mostly in PDF format). A small amount of material is also available in new data formats and a useful reference system has been introduced (see DIGITAL TOPOGRAPHICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY: The Digital Approach).

TopBib was studied as part of the process of adding Egyptian Hieroglyphs to the Unicode Standard. The printed editions originally employed the Gardiner 'Oxford' font used as the primary reference for the initial hieroglyph repertoire.

The idea of using Unicode plan text hieroglyphic for Digital TopBib goes back over a decade and its a good example of a major publication for which plain text meets all hieroglyph requirements.Much work needs to be done to complete the first digital edition but this should benefit greatly from plain text availability.

Bob Richmond