Thursday Lecture: Carlos Zamacona

Digital projects on Earlier Egyptian mortuary texts developed at the University of Alcalá (2019–2026)

Carlos Zamacona (University of Alcalá)

In this paper, I briefly describe five projects of analysis and interpretation of the mortuary texts written in Earlier Egyptian, that is, ancient and middle Egyptian (between 2500 and 1500 BC). Most of the texts under study are inscribed inside rectangular coffins, of which only roughly two hundred are published minimally adequately. The texts consist of copies of the famous Pyramid Texts and the no less famous Coffin Texts. These two terms are Egyptological, not Egyptian, and assume that there is a chronological sequence between both corpora; a point that needs to be reviewed. The use of digital technology can contribute to this aspect, but the lines of research implemented through these five projects have two fundamental, much more practical objectives:

Accelerate the research community's access to the largest corpus of texts ever written in ancient Egypt with a powerful tool that will allow for in-depth, large-scale analysis of graphemics, morphology, syntax and semantics, as well as interdisciplinary studies in history, religion, anthropology and archaeology.

Provide universal access to these texts through the Internet, following the basic principle of open science.