Project Ramses is an initiative concerned with the annotated
encoding of Late Egyptian texts (approximately scoped to 1350-750 BC). Work started in 2006 based at the University of Liège in Belgium and an interesting snapshot of progress to 2012 is given in The Ramses Project: Exploring Ancient Egyptian linguistic data using a richly annotated corpus [pdf].
Ramses Online is provides a web application to enable specialists to work with the Project Ramses database. Hieratic is transliterated into hieroglyphic for human readability and machine processing. An
initial ‘beta’ version became available online in August 2015 and up to date background
information is outlined in a document by Stéphane Polis: http://be.dariah.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Ramses_Stephane_Polis.pdf. The current website is implemented in French but international support (in
English) is stated to be planned.
Ramses Online is an invaluable resource for Egyptologists and already
contains much useful material from hundreds of ancient hieratic and hieroglyphic writing sources.
A technical point. At present Ramses Online renders hieroglyphic as graphics, not text. Improved functionality of projects such as this should be straightforward to re-implement
using Unicode plain text when available. Indeed I envisage the Ramses (𓇳𓄟𓋴𓋴) corpus as a useful test case for plain text and more elaborate schemes based on plain text.
Bob Richmond
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