Tag: Egypt

Send Texts in Hieroglyphics, or Do Some Serious Work

All your base are belonging to us. Source: Fabricius Hieroglyphics Converter

Fabricius is a Google Arts & Culture project to use AI to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Use it to translate your emoji-filled text messages to hieroglyphics with the Fabricius Text to Hieroglyphics Converter, or if you have some ancient hieroglyphics you seriously want translate, use the workbench (only works on desktops and Middle Egyptian).

The journey began with The Hieroglyphics Initiative, a Ubisoft research project that was launched at the British Museum in September 2017 to coincide with the release of Assassin’s Creed Origins. Working with Google and development agency Psycle Interactive, the project sought to identify whether machine learning could transform the process of collating, cataloguing and understanding the written language of the Pharaohs.

Fabricius: About. https://artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/fabricius/en/about

Egyptian Artifacts at Glencairn

Some of the Egyptian artifacts on display at Glencairn, a mansion turned museum outside of Philadelphia.

stone head of Sakhmet
Head of the goddess Sakhmet, Karnak, Temple of Mut, New Kingdom, Egypt. Glencairn collection. Source: TCM
Relief of Horus on Lotus and Papyrus Clump. Glencairn collection. Source: TCM
Crocodile mummy, Egypt. Glencairn collection. Source: TCM

Early Images of the Classical World: Daguerreotypes of the Monumental Journey


Olympieion, Athens, Viewed from the East, 1842. Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Qatar Museum Collections (IM.314)

In the 1840s, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, a French photographer and architectural historian, took thousands of photographic images of monuments of Greece, Italy, Egypt, and other countries during a three-year long trip around the Mediterranean. The daguerrotypes he produced are the oldest known surviving photos of these locations.

Continue reading Early Images of the Classical World: Daguerreotypes of the Monumental Journey

The Field Trip that Founded, and Filled, the Oriental Institute

Oriental Institute Building

In 1919, James Henry Breasted, archaeologist and founder of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, embarked on a year-long trip through the Middle East. His goal was to identify research opportunities throughout the area, and to obtain artifacts to bring back to Chicago. The story (from a 2010 exhibition at the Institute) was told in Archaeology Magazine.

How Ancient Egyptians Did Math

Mathematician David Reimer on how Ancient Egyptians did their maths, and how it was different from modern mathematics.

In an article for The College of New Jersey (where Reimer is a math professor) he says:

the Egyptian way of thinking about math is deeply satisfying. “Today, we’re taught to do math in a step-by-step way—you do this step, then this one, then this one. If you follow exactly what you’re told, you get the right answer,” Reimer says. “But in Egyptian math, there are any of maybe five to eight tools that you can apply. It’s not a mindless algorithm; it’s more like a Sudoku puzzle.”

And he wrote a book about it:

Count Like an Egyptian