Leiden University launches new platform to create community around ancient Egyptian texts
In a joint project, the Département des Antiquités Égyptiennes Louvre (DAEL), the Leiden Papyrological Institute, the Leiden University Faculty of Humanities and the Centre for Digital Scholarship at Leiden University Libraries have created an online teaching resource designed to show, translate and annotate Abnormal Hieratic script.
Why build a new platform?
This ancient Egyptian Abnormal Hieratic shorthand is notoriously hard to read, let alone master. Experts in the field are few and far between with only a few academics actually publishing in the field. In fact, the Leiden University course in Abnormal Hieratic is the only remaining course worldwide. Because of the scarcity of qualified teachers, current courses sadly often lack the required expert directed, in-class practice time an ideal course on this script would provide. With the new web-based portal, an international community could be developed and facilitated outside the classroom, allowing people to study Abnormal Hieratic script without depending on experts directly.
Abnormal Hieratic
The Abnormal Hieratic script was used in the south of Egypt as a shorthand for the much more laborious and official ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system, around the 7th century BCE. Shorthand was used for everyday purposes such as keeping records, accounting or writing official letters. Knowledge of other ancient Egyptian scripts is a prerequisite for learning Abnormal Hieratic, along with – according to Leiden University lecturer Koenraad Donker van Heel in his A Very Easy Crash Course in Abnormal Hieratic – “a little talent, patience, flexibility (and preferably a sense of humour).”
Goals
The creation of this new teaching platform is primarily aimed at the development of a larger community around Abnormal Hieratic material sources available in collections all over the world. This community would not only consist of outright experts, however. People with differing levels of proficiency with Abnormal Hieratic script will be able to participate. Relative novices will be able to start their learning process through introductory videos, to later move on to online courses and other teaching resources. The expert or academic community will be able to discuss their quandaries on the platform, helping one another to better understand 7th-century BCE Egyptian civilization.
What does the platform do?
The small but industrious community of scholars in the field has compiled a number of paleographies about available texts over many years, and have managed to transcribe and transliterate many texts in previous publications. The new portal created by the Centre for Digital Scholarship at Leiden University Libraries allows users to view Abnormal Hieratic sources in detail, in a purpose-built online environment. The transcriptions, transliterations and lots of other information about these sources are conveniently displayed alongside images of the original source, aggregating information that was previously only available to a very limited group. The platform also uses information from Trismegistos, a platform specializing in metadata about texts from the ancient world. In that way, every bit of information that a student of the Abnormal Hieratic script might need has been conveniently gathered in one place.
Interoperability and using the platform for other scripts
The online portal is built in a WordPress environment. This platform was selected because of its versatility and common implementation. Coincidentally, WordPress is also relatively easily customizable. This ensures that the core of the platform, now implemented to facilitate teaching and research around one script and set of sources, could be used to quickly and easily build similar platforms for other communities or scripts, ancient or otherwise.
One of the recent innovations that have made this project possible is the International Image Interoperability Framework or IIIF. Most sources written in Abnormal Hieratic that were digitized by their respective cultural institutions were not available cross-platform. That is, most repositories weren’t able or to show any of the images and metadata generated by other institutions. As the name would suggest, cross-platform interoperability is one of IIIF’s main goals. Through IIIF, researchers using the Abnormal Hieratic platform will be able to view, annotate and do remote research on texts from the Louvre and hopefully many other institutions. The website in its current form would not have been possible without the cooperation of our colleagues at the Département des Antiquités égyptiennes Louvre, who generously shared their digital source material. As more Abnormal Hieratic sources are digitized, more texts will be available to users. All via the same platform, ensuring a relatively easy and stress-free experience.
So, through the implementation of various recent innovations in the field of digital resource and community management, the Centre for Digital Scholarship at Leiden University Libraries has created an entirely new kind of shared learning environment. The platform is currently live. We would appreciate your feedback.