The Karnak Cachette Texts On-Line: the Encoding of Transliterated Hieroglyphic Inscriptions
Résumé
Between 1903 and 1907, G. Legrain discovered around 800 stone statues, stelae and other objects in a large pit (the so-called “Cachette”) inside the temple of Amun at Karnak, in which they were piously buried by the Egyptian priests, probably during the 1st century B.C. They include a number of royal effigies of all periods but most of the statues primarily belong to the priests who officiated at Karnak from the New Kingdom to the end of the Ptolemaic Period.
The Karnak Cachette Database is an on-line inventory of the Cachette and a tool to search this rich corpus. The first version was launched in 2009; it provides, insofar as possible, a general description of each object (with dimensions, materials, dating), a label, the date of discovery, different inventory numbers, and a bibliography. Version 2 was put online in 2012: it includes an extensive access to the photographic documentation (more than 8,000 photographs are now available); this database has been regularly updated thereafter.
Building on this well-defined corpus, the project aims now at developing the tools to encode, search and publish electronically the hieroglyphic texts inscribed on these objects, which provide anthroponomical, toponymical and prosopographical data and are therefore of historical and documentary significance. The encoding is developed according to the recommendations of the Text Encoding Initiative in combination with relevant “best practices” in the field of Digital Humanities applied to Epigraphy (Elliott et alii 2007; Cayless et alii, 2009). In this sense, even though the project takes into account many of the EpiDoc schema rules, it is only partially compliant with this TEI customization because of the specificities of both the project and Ancient Egyptian Epigraphy (compare with Lamé 2009), and also because there is a necessity to fall within the scope of other Egyptological projects dealing with textual corpora (Winand, Polis, Rosmorduc in press).
Xefee, a tool to encode transliterated hieroglyphic inscriptions
It is well known that XML is far from being a human friendly way to encode texts. Several XML editors are already available; some of them are highly customizable and can be used by very specific project, providing the users are proprely trained and some implementation time and effort is spent. However, due to the specific features of the texts from the Karnak Cachette – for instance in terms of prosopography –, and the general philosophy of the project – edit and analyse texts that require full Egyptological proficiencies –, it has been decided to create a specific XML Editor that would make easier the text input, its marking up as well as the generation of the XML/TEI files.
Xefee – XML Editor for Egyptian Epigraphy – is a desktop Java application developed on Netbeans. It mainly consists of a general user interface (GUI) which provides all the necessary tools for managing and encoding the ancient Egyptian texts as well as the descriptive data pertaining to the Karnak Cachette project. These tools range from an import module that directly converts to XML the hieroglyphic text transcriptions written according to Egyptological standards, to more complex components intended to manage genealogical data.
The tab dealing with text encoding offers to the user a panel of buttons, combo-boxes and other controls that facilitate the marking up the texts with tags pertaining to epigraphy (
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