150 Years of Hieroglyphic in Type: Anniversary of the first typeset Egyptian dictionary

2017 marks the 150th anniversary of the first printing of a typeset dictionary and grammar of Egyptian Hieroglyphic, written by Samuel Birch (at the time employed by the British Museum as head of the Egyptian and Assyrian Department).

The dictionary and grammar took the form of several hundred pages of extensive additions by Birch to Volume V of the (1867) English translation Egypt's place in Universal History of Aegyptens Stelle in der Weltgeschichte (1845-) by C. C. J. Baron Bunsen. Birch and Bunson collaborated ten years earlier on additions to the English edition of Volume I (translated by Charles Cotterel; Longmans, 1848) notably concerning the writing system (including Appendix II - a hieroglyphic sign list).

About the typesetting process, Birch writes in his preface to Volume V:

The hieroglyphic used in this volume has been cast by Mr. Branston from designs drawn by Mr. Joseph Bonomi. It is the sole hieroglyphical fount in this country, and its importance can only be sufficiently appreciated from the consideration that Messrs. Longman have fulfilled, at a heavy cost, a task only undertaken abroad by foreign governments.

The advantage of this type to the present volume cannot be too highly appreciated, as it has rendered it practicable to print the Egyptian Dictionary, the Grammar, and the Chrestomathy in a form which renders the study of the hieroglyphs accessible both to the student and general enquirer. The Dictionary is the only one hitherto printed in this country, nor has any hieroglyphical dictionary appeared elsewhere, except that of Champollion, published in 1841, which contained only a few of the principal words.  Its phonetic arrangement will, it is hoped, render it particularly easy of consultation. It has been a great labour to compile and print it, and the execution of it has been a task of many years.

A feature of the Bonomi typeface is the use of mostly solid filled in hieroglyphs. There is no attempt to detail most signs as is popular practice for the majority of hieroglyphic fonts later and nowadays.

Hieroglyphic typesetting was new technology in the mid-Nineteenth century and many later publications followed, using a variety of fonts, The Lepsius/Theinhardt font is probably the best known from that era.

Modern digital hieroglyphic, both the first generation MdC approach and the new Unicode/Opentype based systems, have characteristics that can be traced back though the early works by Birch and Lepsius. The corpus of 150 years of hieroglyphic content in type has proved very useful in devising new techniques and designing new fonts.

Some developments don't happen overnight. The goal to make hieroglyphic available to the student and general enquirer expressed by Birch has advanced gradually over 150 years with many modern publications available fairly inexpensively in print. Yet in terms of the potential of modern technology, there is much more to be done.

Sadly, the Birch publication never made it to the best seller lists of the day.

E. A. Budge dedicated his Dictionary of Hieroglyphs (1920) to the memory of Samuel Birch (whose Ancient Egyptian courses he attended and later worked with for a couple of years at the British Museum). In the introduction to his dictionary, Budge writes:

... it is quite impossible to hide the fact that the inclusion of Birch's Egyptian Dictionary in the fifth volume of the English translation was a great misfortune for the Dictionary itself and for the beginner in Egyptology for whom the work was primarily intended. There was an interval of seven years between the publication of the fourth and fifth volumes of the English translation of Aegyptens Stelle in der Weltgeschichte, arid there seems to be no doubt that public interest in Bunsen's scheme of chronology drooped when its author died in 1860, the year which saw the appearance of the fourth volume, and was practically dead when the fifth volume was published in 1867. According to Birch, the volume fell " flat," and its editor and publishers were greatly disappointed. Whether the edition was a small one or not I have no evidence to show, but it was certainly the fact that for some reason or other copies of the volume were difficult to get in the early "seventies." It was said at the time that the publishers, being dissatisfied with the sales, had "disposed" of the sheets of a large number of copies The natural result was that when people found out that the volume contained Birch's Dictionary and Grammar and Chrestomathy the copies that found their way into the market fetched relatively very high prices, or at all events prices which effectively placed the book beyond the reach of the ordinary student. When I attended Birch's Egyptian classes in 1875-76 and needed the book urgently, I was obliged to trace each page of it on a separate sheet of tracing paper, omitting the references, and when these sheets were bound I used them for some years with great benefit. Moreover, the volume of  the English translation of Bunsen's work formed a veritable tomb for Birch's Dictionary. The title-page of it sets forth quite clearly that the "Historical Investigation" was by Bunsen, and that it was translated from the German by Charles H. Cottrell, Esq., M.A., and that it contains "Additions by Samuel Birch, LL.D." But who could possibly imagine from this last remark that Birch's contribution was 594 pages, i.e., nearly three-quarters of the whole volume, or that his contribution included an Egyptian Dictionary, the first ever published arranged on phonetic principles (!), and containing about 4,500 entries of Egyptian words, and names of gods and places, with references and translations, and an Egyptian Grammar and Chrestomathy? Or, again, take the case of the student who wants to consult these works and who, hearing that copies of them are to be seen in the British Museum Library, goes to the Reading Room to see them. He turns up the entry Birch, Samuel, LL.D., of the British Museum, in the Great Catalogue, but fails to find any mention of the Dictionary of Hieroglyphics or Grammar and Chrestomathy, because they are not mentioned in any one of the columns of names of the other books and papers which Birch wrote. All that he will find connecting Birch with an Egyptian Dictionary is the entry, " Sketch of a Hieroglyphical Dictionary, London, 1838," and unless he receives further instruction he will conclude that the " Sketch" published in 1838 is useless to him, and that Birch's Egyptian Dictionary never appeared.

An account from which several lessons can be learned.


Bob Richmond

Web browser test for hieroglyphic (December 2016)

I've released a Hieroglyphs Everywhere Project (HEP) web browser test page for Unicode hieroglyphic to provide a simple test you can use to check at a glance the status of the web browser(s) you are using on PCs or other devices.

HEP uses web fonts so there's no need to install a hieroglyphic font on a PC or other device. HEP resources work within the scope of Unicode (2009) hieroglyphic to preview features relating to the new hieroglyphic writing system (currently expected in Unicode 11, 2018).

I'm making the test page available ahead of time so we can become aware of any unexpected issues.

Up to date versions of Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge/Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox work well as a general rule. Keeping your web browser up to date is highly recommended, irrespective of hieroglyphic, for security and performance reasons.

I've found Firefox works consistently over a wide range of devices (including Android, Linux, macOS and Windows systems) aside from some minor visual variations.

Chrome varies from system to system: for instance polychromatic is missing from Windows 7 and (surprisingly) Android at this time. On Windows 10 a Chrome bug displays bold polychromatic text in black and white.

Safari still renders polychromatic text as monochrome on macOS and iOS. Presumably this will be fixed sometime in 2017. Meanwhile Firefox is available to Mac users for greater web standards compliance including polychromatic text.

Internet Explorer, like Chrome, is limited in capabilities by its host system for example IE on Windows 7 lacks modern font technology. If you are forced to use a legacy Windows 7 system I'd recommend you switch web browser from IE if you haven't already. I have a HEP work-around for some IE/Windows 7 issues but would rather spend the time needed on something useful unless this turn out to be a major problem.

During 2017, I expect to update and extend the test page from time to time. Several reasons for this can be anticipated.

1. Progress with the Unicode Standard for the Egyptian Hieroglyphic writing system and repertoire extensions.
2. Identification of browser bugs, e.g. in OpenType font rendering.
3. Additional browser features or browser bug avoidance techniques used by the Hieroglyphs Everywhere Project.

Bob Richmond

Several Observations concerning Polychromatic Egyptian Hieroglyphic fonts

The Egyptian Hieroglyphic writing system is inherently polychromatic. The colour or colours used for individual hieroglyphs involve naturalistic, symbolic and conventional characteristics adapted to the materials or pigments available to the artist/scribe. For the most part, hieroglyphs were coloured consistently in a single painting or inscription. Conventions were used, for instance green is associated with growing plants and life, blue the sky and primeval flood. These characteristics of hieroglyphic makes it possible to envisage coherent polychromatic fonts with useful applications.

Symbol & Magic in Egyptian Art (R. H. Wilkinson, 1994), Chapter 5, provides a good introduction to Egyptian use of colour.

Hieroglyphic will be the first intrinsically chromatic Unicode writing system. It is important, however, to be clear that Unicode itself and its hieroglyphic content do not define chromatic features. This is done by systems built on Unicode such as CSS/HTML web standards, typically using the OpenType font standard for text rendering. Modern versions of web browsers such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge/Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox already implement font technology to work with basic polychromatic, mainly thanks to the popularity of colour emoji.

Once hieroglyphic writing system additions are available in the Unicode standard there can be little doubt that polychromatic will dominate casual use of hieroglyphic. Hundreds of millions of children around the world encounter Egyptian each year as part of their education and colour makes hieroglyphic more comprehensible and interesting. This situation will benefit Egyptology since it will encourage digital industries to support Unicode hieroglyphic in their products. There are questions such as how far to scope casual hieroglyphic but the earliest this widespread deployment could begin is Summer 2018 so there is ample time to experiment with options and discuss details before a universal font rollout.

The situation with polychromatic for scholarly applications is different. Monochrome hieroglyphic has 150 years of publications to inform on strengths and weaknesses of transcriptions but there is no tradition of polychromatic typefaces at all. There are obvious benefits of colour such as hieroglyphs which look similar in monochrome yet have distinctive colour in paintings. Birds G001 ꜣ 𓄿 and G004 tyw 𓅂 are good examples. Nevertheless in the short term I expect most Egyptological work to continue to focus on monochrome. This principle also applies to implementation of Unicode hieroglyphic fonts and the methods, resources and tools for working with the next generation of hieroglyphic technology where there's a lot still to do. Incidentally, hieratic transcriptions that follow traditional use of red and black ink in hieratic do not need polychromatic fonts. Nevertheless if you are producing a book, thesis, museum website or the like aimed at the 2018/19 time-frame it is not too early to consider whether or how polychromatic hieroglyphic might be used to advantage.

My own work on polychromatic began with the simple question: is it technically feasible at the current state of technology? For a long time the answer has been no. As recently as January, when the Unicode hieroglyphic writing system was expected in 2017, polychromatic seemed best left to the second stage of development when technology was slightly further ahead. However, one positive result of the delay to 2018 is it now proves possible to bring polychromatic forward by a year for use by specialists (as noted above widespread deployment should wait on the standards process).

Hieroglyphic fonts are fairly complex to develop. Polychromatic adds more technical complexity. To simplify the first font I decided to focus on two aspects. 1. Use in a dictionary application and 2. software user interface (UI). This reduces quadrat layout and chromatic complexity, for instance I could ignore vertical writing and the tall or complex quadrats needed in some transcription scenarios. This is still a work in progress but I hope write more on the topic during 2017.

Bob Richmond

Some remarks about Unicode Hieroglyphic fonts

Some topics are so well known that often they are not even mentioned. This post is about one such topic namely that there are many modern fonts on computers and other digital devices so a writer or publisher needs to choose one or more that work for a specific purpose. Choose the wrong font for your content and the result will be be missing or unsatisfactory characters. This is true for hieroglyphic like every other writing system,

Currently all Unicode Egyptian Hieroglyphic font releases I know of implement the whole Unicode Standard (2009) basic repertoire of 1071 hieroglyphs. There are no subset fonts for specific purposes such as early school education where two hundred signs would be more than adequate. So right now we don't see missing characters or need to take a variety of fonts into account to a great extent.

With ongoing work to extend the Unicode repertoire and include quadrat shaping to make an actual writing system, this situation will likely change considerably. A font designer concerned with the classical phase of the writing system will not want to spend months or years dealing with thousands of specialist hieroglyphs attested only from the Ptolemaic period. A font designed to work well for Ramesside hieratic transcription into hieroglyphic cannot be expected to optimise quadrat arrangements irrelevant to hieratic. A font optimised for small print (e.g. 12pt - 18pt) may make different design choices for glyphs and quadrat shaping than one optimised for 24pt plus).

Furthermore decorative colour fonts are now possible using OpenType but such fonts may be limited in scope to specific purposes.

In short, over time we can expect a wide range of hieroglyphic fonts will evolve. As with modern writing systems. Some aspiring to beauty, others providing specialist functionality. Their scope of use will often be different.

First generation digital hieroglyphic systems (typically using one or another form of Manuel de Codage aka MdC coding), mask these issues. Specialist hieroglyphic software to date typically uses a single 'one size fits all' font such as a Gardiner or Hierogyphica derivation with a single fixed method of arranging hieroglyphs in quadrats. New thinking is needed to embrace a rich world of multiple fonts and take advantage of the Unicode principle of separating plain text encoding data from the fonts used to render the text.

Some of the difficulties in gaining consensus on next steps for Unicode appear to be grounded in the mistaken notion that Unicode should be used in exactly the same way as MdC practice as if the goal were a single Unicode hieroglyphic font that does everything an Egyptologist could ever ask for. There is room for a general purpose font or two - a fallback font - but it should be understood its a small part of the story for many purposes,

One practical consequence of font diversity is Unicode hieroglyphic in plain text can expect to show an 'unsupported character' glyph when displayed using a font that does not support the writers intent. Likewise a quadrat control character sequence will have visible control characters for quadrats the font does not support and might look like:

(actually all quadrats in this specific illustration will likely be fine in most fonts but it illustrates the principle).

This is no different to the situation with Unicode in many disciplines. Mathematical typesetting is a good complex example but even simple examples are commonplace in everyday life if you read beyond a-z. The solution is to understand what you are doing and use appropriate fonts, formats, and software tools for the task in hand. If specific fonts don't do the job you simply don't use them.

Like many concepts this topic will be trivial to understand once hieroglyphic is available for use as a writing system and multiple fonts are released. For now it needs a little imagination.

Historical note

As far as I know (and someone correct me if I am wrong!) the first hieroglyphic typeface was that used in the hieroglyphic dictionary and grammar of Samuel Birch, published in 1867. Next year, we can celebrate 150 years of hieroglyphs in print.

Facsimiles of typeface used in Samuel Birch's' Grammar and Dictionary from 1867. 

The Gardiner/Oxford metal typeface was cut around 60 years after Birch/Bonomi/Longman and several other fonts made and used during the intervening years. Lepsius/Theinhardt is probably the best known of these. The usual MdC situation with a single all-purpose font has a long tradition in print.

It is only recently that we are starting to see richer use of multiple fonts. A good example is Middle Egyptian Literature (James Allen, 2015) which makes effective use of a distinctive bold face.

Distinctive bold font in Middle Egyptian Literature (2015)

I expect we'll see many more innovations once the additions to Unicode are available and supported. We are approaching the beginning of a new era.


Bob Richmond

Unicode Hieroglyphs in web browsers: Web Fonts

I outlined the situation with hieroglyphic for general purpose web pages in an earlier post Unicode Hieroglyphs in web browsers: generic web pages. This note outlines another way of presenting Unicode hieroglyphs on a web page designed for Egyptian.

Web fonts are fonts that are requested by web pages for download (if necessary) for use on the web page. WOFF (the Web Open Font Format [Wikipedia]) is the international standard for packaging web fonts. All popular browsers have supported WOFF since 2010. Browsers may still support older schemes for 'font embedding' for compatibility issues with old web pages but for the vast majority of web sites WOFF should be used and the older schemes avoided.

Web fonts are especially useful for web pages that want to make use of specialist writing systems without having to rely on the writing system being fully supported on your device in order to read the page. They are therefore potentially useful for Egyptian Hieroglyphic in Unicode.

Some useful points to be aware of.

• Web fonts are compressed and usually 'cached' on the local device so they need not be downloaded each time they are used. This is especially useful and efficient for mobile devices.
• Browser software usually needs to be enhanced every time the Unicode standard is updated as relates to a specific writing system. This will affect progress during introduction of the hieroglyphic writing system.
• Services such as Google Fonts can supply identical fonts to a wide range of web sites. Google Fonts is easy for web site developers to use, and only a single copy of the font needs to be downloaded for sharing among sites that use it. For Egyptian Hieroglyphs the recent delays in Unicode standardisation and the cost of creation and release of suitable Google Fonts means this route will probably be impractical for some time unless there is adequate support for the process.
• Fonts can be provided on an individual site basis. This is the short term approach to be adopted for the Hieroglyphs Everywhere Project web site which also hopes to provide the tools to enable other sites to do the same once the Unicode standard is updated. The same approach could be adopted for a large web site such as Wikipedia.
• If you copy hieroglyphic from a web page that uses a web font to another application (or web page), that application (or web page) will need to have access to the same (or similar) font in order to gain a satisfactory result. This is no different to any writing system but less obvious in the well-supported systems such as the Latin-based scripts used for English and other popular languages . 

Much can be said on technical aspects of web fonts so I'll likely return to the topic when there is more use of Egyptian Hieroglyphic in Unicode on the web.

In order to set the ball rolling on hieroglyphic web fonts I've created a Browser Test Page for Hieroglyphic in Unicode development. This page uses a web font with a feature to get around the fact that the hieroglyphic writing system is not yet available in Unicode (we have 1071 hieroglyphs but control characters for quadrat arrangements are still being delayed). You can use the page to confirm your web-browser is working correctly. (If there are problems on specific devices I'd like to hear about them so this can be resolved or documented to inform others in a similar situation. Thanks.)

Bob Richmond

Unicode Hieroglyphs in web browsers: generic web pages

In an ideal world, Egyptian hieroglyphs in Unicode will simply appear as such to the reader when they are used on a website page. The general reader should not have to do anything special such as install a font or configure the web browser in order to display Unicode text.

Egyptian-aware web pages may render text as images (as mentioned in various earlier posts, e.g. on WikiHiero) or use web-fonts to provide a full text experience. These techniques generally work well with reasonably up to date web browsers on all kinds of devices.

However, this post is concerned with generic web pages meaning web pages without any special coding for Egyptian hieroglyphs. These pages rely on the web browser and/or its underlying operating system to render correctly.

Probably the best known example of a generic web page is the Google search page www.google.com. This blog post itself is also such a web page, hosted on www.blogspot.com so if all is well with the browser and device on which you are reading you should see hieroglyphs at the end of this sentence - 𓇳𓄟𓋴𓋴.

Then if you copy then paste these four hieroglyphs into Google search, you see something like this:

I've highlighted the hieroglyphs in red boxes. Search is just one example. If you want to write hieroglyphs in web forums or read hieroglyphs as text on an arbitrary web page chances are you are reliant on generic hieroglyph support from your web-browser.

Modern versions of macOS/iOS from Apple and Windows 10 from Microsoft are Egyptian hieroglyphic ready 'out of the box' and so are their supplied web browsers (Safari, Edge or Internet Explorer) . So is a correctly configured Linux distro. Generic web pages just work for users of hundreds of millions of these modern devices.

If this works for you, great. The browser or system you are using is Unicode hieroglyphic ready and you are done with this post unless you are curious about technicalities.

However the global picture is not yet entirely rosy. Android, by far the most popular system for mobile phones and tablets, is not yet up to speed. Old versions of iOS/macOS and Windows are not hieroglyph ready. When you try the Google search on these kinds of system you likely see box characters where hieroglyphs are expected unless something has been added to these systems to avoid problems.

Why hieroglyphs work (or don't)

Technically for a web browser to render hieroglyphic text on a generic web page all it needs to do is:

1. Recognise the text characters are hieroglyphs.
2. Use a font with hieroglyphs to render the characters.

The Google search illustration above is from Windows 10 using Internet Explorer 11. Everything works as expected because Windows 10 comes with the Segoe UI Historic font (which contains Unicode hieroglyphs). Internet Explorer recognises hieroglyph characters and, in the absence of any more specific font specifications on the web page, uses the Segoe font as default. The Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox browsers also work correctly.

However, even on Windows 10, the Chrome browser (version 59 and earlier) is not hieroglyph ready. It does not detect hieroglyphs on a web page and choose an available font. Chrome 59 serves as an illustration of how things can go wrong when a browser has bugs in font handling.

The latest release of Android (6.01) has an additional problem in that Android comes with a very limited number of fonts installed. Hieroglyphic is not and this is just one of a large number of writing systems that therefore don't render in Chrome, the standard Android web browser, because no font is available or automatically downloaded when required. In theory a Android device could work when the device maker supplies an enhanced version of  Android. In practice I've never seen this happen. Presumably we'll see a working version of Chrome from Google eventually. Meanwhile Chrome should be fine for most Egyptian-aware web-pages.

Getting hieroglyphs to work for generic web pages

With the huge range of devices and browsers available nowadays it is impossible to give detailed information about what may or may not be done to address problems if your setup is not hieroglyph ready.

In many cases the simplest solution is to update your system setup if possible and/or ensure your web browser version is kept up to date.The technical world has moved a long way since 2009 when hieroglyphs were introduced to the Unicode standard but initially unsupported in the then latest systems such as Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and Windows 7.

Updating is easy for most Linux distros, Apple now provides macOS/iOS updates free of charge and likewise Microsoft provides updates from Windows 7/8 to Windows 10 (strangely, this is currently stated to be free of charge for only a limited time until late July 2016).

If updating is impossible, it seems the Firefox browser works correctly on Linux and Windows devices I've tried so long as it finds a Unicode hieroglyphic font installed. This may work for you. In particular if you are stuck with an old PC setup with Windows 7 it should be sufficient to install a Unicode hieroglyphic font then use Firefox for generic web-browsing instead of Internet Explorer or Chrome. Other less well known browsers may also work.


Bob Richmond

Hieroglyphic Fonts and the Universal Shaping Engine

An Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system such as that proposed for Unicode plain text needs to cope with writings such as

where two or more hieroglyphs can be arranged in groups such as one hieroglyph above another as in this example. In digital media, hieroglyphic is therefore an example of a writing system that needs Complex Text Layout (CTL) [Wikipedia] to display text. Much of the worlds text doesn't need CTL but Arabic is a popular writing system that does and there are many others including Indic scripts such as Bengali and Devanagari.

From an end user point of view the technical underpinnings of a writing system should be as invisible as possible, ideally everything should just work naturally. That is a goal of the Hieroglyphs Everywhere Project (HEP). However, for that to happen it is necessary for various pieces of the puzzle to fit together. In this note I'll try to explain where the Universal Shaping Engine (USE) fits into the picture.

Traditionally a writing system that requires CTL needs specialist fonts and customized software. The software elements may be part of the Operating System (Android, iOS, Linux, Windows etc.) or part of an application (Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, Web Browser etc.). To include a new writing system or evolve a supported system in this traditional way is a complicated process which can take years to feed through to the user base.

USE reduces the complexity of this situation by providing software features to enable an OpenType font to implement CTL for its chosen writing systems. In practical terms this means once Unicode is released with plain text hieroglyphic functionality, compatible fonts can be made available and they will be usable with applications such as web browsers and systems that support USE. For instance, there is no need in principle to expect a long wait for web browsers to be adapted to support fonts for hieroglyphic writing so long as browser and font support USE.

The first implementations of USE were released in 2015. Windows 10 integrated the engine on initial release. HarfBuzz (an open source component used in Linux, Firefox, Chrome/Chromium and LibreOffice among others) introduced USE support at version 1.0. The USE specification is available from Creating and supporting OpenType fonts for the Universal Shaping Engine [Microsoft Typography].

I've no information on the current status of USE for Android or Apple iOS/Mac systems. All I can say is it would be surprising if USE support were not widely available by around this time next year (the earliest we can expect plain text hieroglyphic to be released in the Unicode standard). I'd also guess that it is unlikely legacy operating systems such as pre-OS X El Capitan or Windows 7/8 will see USE integration (although it is quite possible that applications such as some web browsers may support USE on these legacy systems).

For Hieroglyphs Everywhere Project I'm working on the assumption USE is the future for hieroglyphic fonts. However, alternate methods are used in the short to medium term while Unicode plain text is not available. This alternate mechanism then remains available for situations where for some reason users are unable to work with up to date operating systems and software.

The recent article making fonts for the Universal Shaping Engine [pdf] by John Hudson makes a good read for font developers or those curious to learn more. The post Windows shapes the world’s languages [Windows Experience Blog] gives some interesting background.

Bob Richmond