Search for an Ancient Egyptian word and see how it changed over 4,000 years, from hieroglyphs through Demotic to Coptic.
- Technical summary
- An interactive visualization tool for exploring Ancient Egyptian lemmas and linguistic data.
- Topics
What it is
A lemma is a dictionary headword: the base form of a word. Egyptian was written for about 4,000 years, first in hieroglyphs, later in Demotic, and finally in Coptic, and many words survived through all of those stages.
This visualizer lets you search for a lemma (in transliteration, in Coptic, or by its English meaning, like “baboon”) and see it as a network connecting its earlier and later forms.
What I did
- Parsed and structured Egyptian, Demotic and Coptic lemma datasets into linked networks
- Built the interactive visualization in the browser
How it works
- Frontend: HTML, CSS and JavaScript
- Visualization: D3.js (v7) renders the word networks
- Scripts: Noto fonts display hieroglyphs and Coptic directly in the page
- Data: pre-processed lemma and network data loaded as JSON
Status
Live. Try it with the button above.