The goal of the project is to compile a corpus of Egyptian texts, enabling online vocabulary research through the entire history of the Egyptian language.

In use for 4500 years, the “dead” Egyptian/Coptic language has the longest documented history of any of written language. It reflects the world view of a defining culture of antiquity and how that culture understood knowledge.

Research units at the sister institutions of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Saxonian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Leipzig, are working together to create a comprehensive digital corpus of Egyptian texts from every stage of the language and in all scripts, annotated lexically, morphologically, and syntactically, and linked to an analogously structured diachronic dictionary. This will make it possible to study texts and vocabulary beyond the boundaries of a single script (hieroglyphic/hieratic, demotic, Coptic) and to comprehend changes in the language.

The corpus and dictionary will be freely available via a dynamic user interface on the Internet: the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae. 

The Academy research project “Structure and Transformation in the Vocabulary of the Egyptian Language: Texts and Knowledge in the Culture of Ancient Egypt” is part of the Academies' Programme , a research funding programme co-financed by the German federal government and individual federal states. Coordinated by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities , the Programme intends to retrieve and explore our cultural heritage, to make it accessible and highlight its relevance to the present, as well as to preserve it for the future.