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Wondering if anyone has copied any Ancient Egyptian texts such as this into Unicode Hieroglyphs or something similar, rather than English translations. Or if not, if there are photographs of the original Egyptian hieroglyphic texts.

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Here is a compilation of various resources to learn ancient classical Egyptian (aka Middle Egyptian) and a selection of various corpus to read. NB: The texts and resources I am quoting here and purely in hieroglyphics, you will not find here hieratic (the "cursive form" of hieroglyphs) or demotic. Also, notice you can learn with them Classical Egyptian, with tackling a little bit from your side, old Kingdom stuff, but Ptolemaic writing will be barely accessible, the one in hieroglyphics, I mean here.

Reading manuals:

Friendly warning: While they are still widely used by internauts, FORGET Wallis Budge books... Forget them. They are WAY too old. Way way way. Any of Wallis Budge's books, his one on hieroglyphs or his old translations. Forget them.

Now concerning texts:

  • The Pyramid text online That is the tomb of Unis (they spelled Unas due to the Egyptian i which is often spelled a), with plenty of photos, and English translation. All the tomb is clearly photographed
  • Projet Rosette, a French site, but you do not care, it is written in English with plenty of texts.
  • Annoting Egyptian texts Very nice resource with photos and the text in font translation (easier to read)
  • Saint Andrew Corpus the text in hieroglyphs with the transliteration and the traduction, best way to learn

As you can see, resources are PLENTY. Egyptian is a tough language, very tough, its writing system a pain. But there are tons of excellent resources to study it.
And forget anything written by Wallis Budge. I told it, mentioned it. I am repeating it. They even made fun of the fact Wallis Budge's books are still in print in the old movie Stargate!!!

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  • That last link is great! Thanks. Unfortunately it doesn't have a copyright license so it probably defaults to private use only.
    – Lance
    Oct 22, 2018 at 8:04
  • Wonder if you know of anything else that is open source / open data / without copyright restrictions. And as a bonus, is in text format.
    – Lance
    Oct 22, 2018 at 16:19
  • Hmm... 5 minutes on Google might yield lots of results, but it's unlikely to allow someone to separate the wheat from the chaff as well as you did.
    – Spencer
    Oct 22, 2018 at 22:35
  • @Gibet good to know, thanks. Also, would be interested to know if you know of any that are (a) open source / copyright permissive, and (b) in text format (rather than PDF).
    – Lance
    Oct 24, 2018 at 7:54
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The largest collection I know of is the Digitized Collections of Ancient Egyptian Source Texts

There's also Hieroglyphic texts from Egyptian stelae, etc

and the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae

As for transcribed texts, consider that there were mainly two word processors used in the last decades to transcribe hieroglyphs: JSesh and Winglyph (the latter seems to be discontinued).

The reason I'm mentioning this: Unicode transcription is fairly recent, and most transcribed texts will still be in JSesh (.gly) format, which uses a classification notation system called Manuel De Codage (MDC). The classication is used in dictionaries such as Middle Egyptian Dictionary.

For example, the text on the Stargate Cover Stone is:

enter image description here

In JSesh, we would write this as:

D21:N35:Q3_-M4_-X1:Z2_-I8:V20-D21:X7-D58-V28B-G43-W15-N1:N25-G43-D21:D36-C1-G17-M17-X1:N35\240-N8-!!

G17-Aa1_-G17_-X1_-S20-O32_-N35:I9_-X7:D21-S29-M4A-A185-Q6:A55-I9:N35-I10:X1-N16:D21-G21-V28B-V28B-N5:Z14-!!

S29-N14-D58-G1-N14:N5-Z2:I9-!!

If you open this notation in JSesh, it looks like this:

enter image description here

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  • oh, I probably should have mentioned that's just my own rendering from freezing the video and trying to figure out the glyphs and entering them in JSesh. It's a hobby :)
    – Codosaur
    Nov 2, 2018 at 11:07
  • on a more entertaining note, you can have loads of fun taking the tour mode of Assassin's Creed Origins and just climb the buildings, the obelisks, etc. and see what's written on them.
    – Codosaur
    Nov 2, 2018 at 11:17

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