Gardiner2Unicode: Mapping Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Founded 3 years ago

A helper tool for drawing Egyptian hieroglyphs and mapping’ their IDs

Wait, what?

The project gardiner2unicode is a simple Python package providing easy access to the mapping between the "special IDs" of the common Egyptian hieroglyphs and their Unicode table numbers. These 'special IDs' are usually called the "Gardiner’s sign list". This registry is named after Sir Alan Henderson Gardiner, one of the greatest Egyptologists ever, who compiled this list in one of his works. 

Hieroglyphs from the Pyramid of Unas with the corresponding Gardiner codes.

Another additional function of the package is the generation of hieroglyphs as *.PNG images using the provided font. 

Getting the Unicode ID. Generating the image.

By default, the library uses the NewGardiner font (license: OFL 1.1).

But… why?


Those working with ancient texts or those working on various hieroglyph recognition tasks may benefit from this project. Recent examples of cases for possible applications are the tasks solved with Fabricius, Glyphnet, etc.

The project has been published very recently, in late November 2021, so it needs to be tested more thoroughly. It would be great if this tool saves someone time, which could instead be used to focus on more important parts of the Ancient Egypt-related projects.

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