Die beschreibende und kommentierte hieroglyphische Zeichenliste als offenes System

Abstract

This paper describes the existing sign-lists of hieroglyphs in their historical context, their structure and purpose. Sign-lists with linguistic and philological claims, such as the Gardiner list or the old Berlin sign-list, the unpublished Hornung list or the list of Schenkel, are isolated and mostly limited. The digitized sign-lists like Manuel de Codage (1988) and Hieroglyphica (2000) are more comprehensive, but suffer from the fact that they are unstructured, unreferenced and undescribed. This causes a lot of problems in the encoding hieroglyphic texts. A new sign list which is now being compiled – the Thot sign-list – describes signs at two levels: (1) References and a bibliography are given for each function that a hieroglyphic sign can fulfil; (2) The iconic features of each hieroglyphic sign are described with a controlled vocabulary. Each sign will be referenced through the publication of textual sources in which the hieroglyph is used in context.