Transcription of Hieratic into Unicode Hieroglyphic: Part 1

It has been standard practice for Egyptologists to transcribe hieratic sources into hieroglyphic for many years. This is an important application of Unicode Hieroglyphic so it is worthwhile to consider the background.

Alan Gardiner, writing in the 1920s, reasons:

1. The first and foremost reason for transcription is undoubtedly interpretation. Hieratic hands vary greatly, and beginners always, and advanced students often, require to know what familiar character a particular hieratic sign or scrawl represents. Interpretation reduces diversity to unity, permits the comparison of one variant with another, facilitates translation, and performs a multitude of other valuable services. Interpretation is indisputably the primary function for which transcription is employed.

2. There is, however, another reason and purpose for transcription which is not so clearly and fully recognized by scholars, though it is of equal importance with the last. I refer to the reproductive function of transcription. Practical objections of various kinds - expense, printing difficulties, inaccessibility of the originals, etc. - besides the necessity of interpretation referred to above under 1, make the reproduction of hieratic in exact facsimile sometimes unnecessary, and on occasion definitely undesirable. How inconvenient a grammar of Late Egyptian would be, in which all the examples from papyri and ostraca were given in facsimile! … Here I will touch upon another question of expediency. Late Egyptian hieratic is now so well known that in the case of easily legible, relatively "uncial" hands, it is really superfluous to publish every new document in facsimile. Our Egyptological libraries are already far too expensive. For many literary papyri all that is necessary is a good hieroglyphic transcription, leaving it to doubters to verify their doubts by consulting the originals or by inquiring from other scholars to whom the originals are accessible.

To sum up, our transcriptions of hieratic texts of the New Kingdom should at once provide an interpretation of the original hieratic, and also enable the reader to form in his mind a sufficiently good picture of the reading presented by the manuscript. For my own part, I shall not hesitate to use dots and dashes and diacritical marks whenever these seem appropriate or will aid the reader's visualization of the original. Our transcriptions ought most emphatically not to be translations into contemporary hieroglyphic; they are artificial substitutes for the actual manuscripts, substitutes the fabrication of which must be directed by the twin principles of interpretation and reproduction.

From The Transcription of New Kingdom Hieratic; Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 15, No. 1/2 (May, 1929), pp. 48-55 (see  http://www.jstor.org/stable/3854012).

Modern technology has eliminated the problems of expense and inconvenience in making an exact facsimile available of an extant source. A legible photograph costs next to nothing to create and distribute on the web. Some practical concerns Gardiner needed to cope with in his era no longer apply. However, the value of the interpretation and reproductive functions highlighted by Gardiner remains fundamental. Indeed now we have machine automation for search and analysis once hieratic is interpreted and reproduced by transcription into hieroglyphs in one or other digital text encoding. This new facet of reproduction opens up ways of working with hieratic sources undreamed of a century ago. 

To date, the actual work of interpretation and reproduction remain human scholarly activities. Often aided by software applications and (potentially) modern technologies such as Artificial Intelligence. Scholarly questions of transliteration and encoding remain open. How to best represent or work with differences among the orthography of Old, Middle and Late Egyptian manuscripts? How to annotate and present hieratic transcriptions as text and/or present sources now we have far richer textual tools available?

One point I'd like to emphasise is the artificial nature of hieratic transcription to hieroglyphic. It is useful to consider this application of a Unicode hieroglyphic writing system in its own right under the overall Unicode umbrella. In my experience it can be confusing to muddle thinking about original hieroglyphic sources and hieratic transcription.

Transcription of Hieratic to Unicode Hieroglyphic plain text need not address all these issues and practicality boils down to two primary considerations.

1. Ensure the Unicode plain text hieroglyphic writing system captures the layout of hieroglyphs for modern transcription requirements (e.g. as factored into  L2/16-018R [pdf]).
2. Identify extensions to the Unicode hieroglyph repertoire helpful for transcription applications.

Part 2 of this series of posts will focus on the repertoire question.

Bob Richmond