Who Are We
We are a group of Ancient Egyptian scholars, educators, and students dedicated to supporting computer aided Egyptology. While most of us participate in the GlyphStudy Yahoo! Group contributions and participation are welcome from anyone.
How We Came to Be
It all started with the heroic efforts of Mark Vygus who transcribed over 12,000 Ancient Egyptian database entries into an electronic database. It wasn't long before the likes of Luca Brigatti realized that valuable research software could be created around this new resource.
In 2006 Paul Dickson, frustrated with the lack of high-quality dictionaries available, created a dictionary in PDF format based on Mark's database. This dictionary featured a number of unique concepts such as sorting entries in Gardiner order as opposed to the traditional phonetic transcription order.
A couple of years later while searching for resources for his new class on Middle Egyptian Ted Young stumbled upon this dictionary. He realized in the two years that have passed significant improvements have been made to Mark Vygus's database and to the tools all Paul Dickson used to generate his dictionary. Realizing that Paul put a tremendous amount of manual effort into his edition Ted set forward to develop a set of tools that can generate the dictionary in a completely automated fashion.
In June of 2008 Ted introduced his work to the GlyphStudy Yahoo! Group. Immediately the members realized the potential of Mark's database when combined with the technology to produce any arbitrary dictionary in an automated fashion. It was immediately decided to release these tools and resources into the public domain and to structure a project site around them to facilitate collaboration and contribution.