Papyrus Prisse
Egyptian texts were written on many different media. Our impressions today are shaped by the monumental temples. But the funerary culture is also an example par excellence of the Egyptian writing culture, which is characterized by tombs and sarcophagi. Also worthy of mention are the many papyri and ostraca on which Egyptian texts have been preserved. In particular, belles lettres have been preserved on these media. A very famous papyrus is the Papyrus Prisse, named after its discoverer Émile Prisse d’Avesnes. This papyrus is now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
This papyrus - and this is why we are naming it here - has been digitized and can be viewed in all its glory at https://prisse.ifao.egnet.net/. The great photos make it easy to read the beautifully written hieratic text. Because the quality remains excellent when you zoom in, the individual brush strokes of the characters are clearly visible. There is also an option to support your own reading attempts. Click on “Read the Papyrus”! A hieratic sentence is highlighted and its translation is given. Optionally, transliteration and hieroglyphic transcription are added. Wow! That’s great, thanks to the project maintainers! Check the repositorium at Gitlab: https://gitlab.huma-num.fr/nsouchon/papyrus-prisse.
The individual sentences can also be accessed directly: https://prisse.ifao.egnet.net/verse?verses=G1&type=h\|mdc\|e&lang=fr\|en\|ar. This is the first sentence of Kagemni in hieroglyphs, MdC, transliteration, French, English and Arabic translation. But in this form, every sentence of the Papyrus Prisse is accessible! It would be ideal if you could search for the hieroglyphs now, wouldn’t it? That’s why we extracted the MdC code and converted it to Unicode. Serge Rosmorduc informed us that the hieroglyphic coding is licensed according to cc-by, so we can reuse the data. Many thanks to Serge Rosmorduc for his quick response and many thanks to Émil Joubert for encoding the text! As of today, the Papyrus Prisse app has also been integrated into our hieroglyphic meta-search engine, which now includes a total of ten projects! If you want your digital project to be included in our hieroglyphic search engine, let us know!
This work is marked with CC0 1.0 Universal
