The Golden Mask of King Tut The Code. Jesús Ariel Aguirre

In our writing system, a letter by itself does not mean anything, unless we refer to the words of a single letter (a, e, y, o, u) or it is a symbol (N is the chemical symbol nitrogen).

      However, there are certain tricks that make life easier for us and that allow us to know certain expressions that are repeated in many texts. Here are a few tricks for you to start reading little by little.

       ¿Where do I start reading? Hieroglyphs are written from right to left or from left to right, and always from top to bottom. To know which side of the row we have to start reading, we only have to look at the living beings that are drawn in the inscription: we always start reading from the side the animals look at. If there are several symbols in the same column, the top one is always read first.

       If there is a cartridge, it indicates the name of a pharaoh: the only names that could be enclosed in cartridges or shenu, a schematic representation of a rope knotted at the ends, were the names of the pharaohs. Whenever we see a cartridge we can be sure that it contains the name of a pharaoh.

       If we know the monolithic signs, we can begin to read by joining the letters we know. Whenever several consonants join us and we cannot pronounce due to lack of vowels, an “e” is added between them. It really is a convention, because to this day we don’t know what exactly spoken Egyptian would sound like, but it is how it works.

      Thomas tells him that it was the Byzantine emperor Theodosius I who would close all Egyptian temples in 391 and that the last priest capable of reading hieroglyphics may have died in the 5th century, thus losing the possibility of understanding the meaning of these mysterious ancient symbols.

      Jamil Fahmi surprises them with an app that translates ancient hieroglyphs.

      Anne, is it true that you can translate hieroglyphs with an APP?

      Yes, Jamil replies, on the occasion of the 221 anniversary of the discovery of the Rosetta stone, the fragment of a stela that made it possible to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing (discovered on July 15, 1799 by Pierre-Frabcius Bouchard, is a 760-kilo stele that , in a few words, it is a translator of Egyptian-demotic-ancient Greek hieroglyphs), on July 15, 2020 the company Google Arts & Culture, Macquarie University, Ubisoft and Psycle, have presented this tool called Fabricius, the project began in 2017.

      Ubisoft finished the development of The Hieroglyphics Initiative in September 2019, a project that was launched at the British Museum, intentionally coinciding with the release of Assassin’s Creeds: Origins. (A virtual game set in Ancient Egypt). Then working in conjunction with Google and Psycle Interactive, they created a machine learning project to improve the process of collecting, cataloging, and understanding the written language of the ancient Egyptians.

      The easiest way to understand ancient hieroglyphs is by comparing them to modern emojis. Currently an artificial intelligence tool that was created to study the writing of the ancient Egyptians.

      Google presented this new platform, after years of research. It is designed so that experts can use it, and feed with their new discoveries and also for the general public to get closer to one of the most important civilizations of humanity.

      The comparison between an emoji and a glyph may sound a bit simplistic, but deep down it is correct. Thomas says about Fabricus.

      There are two types of glyphs (as learned in Fabricius Decode Egyptiam, ideograms, which belong to an idea, concept or meaning, and phonograms, which seek to convey specific sounds. Google describes its new project as “an experiment that allows us to understand the potential of machine learning to increase efficiency and open new avenues for academic research.” This tool is the result of two intense years of research and perhaps that is why it is not only a working tool for professionals, but also a platform for inexperienced people, which is why it has three modes: learning, playing and working.

      It is a didactic and interactive experience, one can learn more about the way the ancient Egyptians communicated and the models that Google created for the three translation phases.

      Extraction first: a kind of scanning of the Rosetta stone (the discovery that allowed explorers to first understand this writing system) to obtain symbols that are easy for the computer to read and process. Second, the classification: this is where artificial intelligence that works like a neural network more than a thousand glyphs comes in. Finally, the translation: matching sequences and blocks of texts with available dictionaries and published translations.

      It is like a kind of virtual library that compiles the knowledge of almost a hundred years of study of this language in one place. To obtain this very specific knowledge, before it was necessary to go personally to the sources, perhaps to look for Egyptian Grammar of Sir Allan H Gardiner written in 1927; a work that was extremely important to researchers. However, now there are a large number of documents in the cloud that are available to anyone who wants to learn and the revolution of this tool lives there.

      The first step in understanding how it works was to create exact copies of the same hieroglyphs. This is what is known as a facsimile (imitation or exact reproduction of a book, writing, drawing or signature, etc.) From Google they explain that, since many hieroglyphs are similar, researchers must draw them as precisely as possible in order to translate them into posteriori.

      It works like this in three steps:

      - Extraction: take the hieroglyphic script and image sequences, and create workable facsimiles.

      - Classification: training a neural network to correctly identify more than 1000 hieroglyphs.

      - Translation: matching sequences and blocks of texts with available dictionaries and published translations.

      On the Fabricius website there is a small minigame that allows us to draw our own hieroglyphs and check if the Google model is able to recognize them and their meaning.

      Currently only works in English and Arabic, the app also plans to expand its choice of languages.

      If we write for example “welcome baby”, the system will return a good handful of hieroglyphs that really mean “baby in the arms of a mother”. If we hover over the hieroglyphs, Google will tell us which words each symbol refers to.

      In the words of Dr. Roland Enmarch, Senior Lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Liverpool, Fabricius is not yet able to replace in professional, since hieroglyphs change a lot over time and vary depending on the carvers or painters, but it is a important leap in the translation of them.

      Playing is how children are taught, so Fabricius teaches us, for example, to identify the names of royalty, inscribed on cartridges; we have to look for the symbols that are inside an oval.

      Finally Thomas is working on this inscription that dates back a long time, from the time of the famous Akhenaten, worshiper of the sun Aton.

      In this computer center they decipher the hieroglyph.

      Following the track that the Catholic Cardinal Angelo Botticelli repeatedly arrived in the Coptic neighborhood, they go there.

       Coptic neighborhood

      The Coptic Quarter (Qasr al-Sham), is one of the oldest neighborhood in the city. The Copts were the autochthonous Egyptians, that is, those who lived in old Cairo before the arrival of the Arabs. Later the term “Coptic” came to have a religious meaning that designated the Christian Egyptians, who still live mostly in this part of the city.

      The Coptic neighborhood of Cairo is also a pilgrimage site because, according to the New Testament, the family of Jesus took refuge there while they fled from Bethlehem to Egypt. Just as in Jerusalem, where the tomb of Jesus was found, the