A presentation at the International Congress of Egyptologists which took place in Rhodes this May, and another communication at a plenary session at the Vienna ‘computing and Egyptology’ round table in July: two key moments which shook the small world of Egyptology and made the debut of Ramsès official. Ramses? An extraordinary tool which brings together computer sciences and Egyptology, and which will be used to penetrate hieroglyphic writing’s remaining secrets. A long drawn out job led to a conclusion by Jean Winand and his team at the University of Liège’s Egyptology department.

Having at one’s disposal an effective research tool from the perspective of linguistics and philology: that was the starting point of the Ramsès project. ‘We realised,’ explains Professor Jean Winand, ‘that research into the Egyptian language had been slowed down because of a lack of easy access to the documentary material. If you have an idea and you want to test your hypothesis you have to return to the texts. In other words, either you reread your own notes, which are never complete, or you reread the whole corpus. That quickly becomes impossible. It was thus necessary to design tools that could reach the information quickly.’

Tools have existed ever since Egyptology began. The Ramsès project was thus not starting form zero. The first tool that springs to mind is obviously a dictionary. But they are often very old and do not give all the references to a word, being content to cite just a few examples. And that is not enough for researchers, who must aim at exhaustiveness. Furthermore, dictionaries are all too often merely a list of words. They give little or no information about the grammar and it is not through them that one will be able to work on, for example, the subjunctives of all the verbs of a certain type. And it is not dictionaries either that will allow one to look for a word on the basis of all its different inflections. Another example: in hieroglyphic writing (to get an idea of all the different languages and writings read The writings and languages of Ancient Egypt), there is no spelling in the strict sense, at most just graphical or writing habits. The same word can appear with slightly different graphical forms. But a researcher might have need of all the spellings or written forms. S/he would thus need a tool where all the occurrences were sorted out according to the spellings. And again here it is merely a case of quite straightforward, basic searches. Combined searches are impossible with the existing tools we have at the moment. What can one do if one wants to pick out all of a text’s conjunctions and highlight the verb tenses that follow them? And how can one easily pick out the sentences that consist of an expression made up of several terms. Or how about refining results and searches in terms of a document’s date, the type of writing, hieroglyphic or hieratic, or in terms of the literary genre and geographical origin? At the moment, all of that is impossible to put to the test.