Sign list

The 1071 hieroglyphs from Unicode 5.2

Encoding

The code points, in the range 0x13000 to 0x1342E, are available starting from Unicode 5.2.

For technical reasons one sometimes uses code points in the range 0xE000 to 0xE42E, which fit in two bytes, unlike the code points for hieroglyphs in Unicode. This alternative range for the Unicode signs is adopted from the EGPZ specification, proposed by Saqqara technology in June 2007. We emphatically do not endorse however the signs in the EGPZ that go beyond the Unicode set.

The mnemonics for signs are those in J. Buurman et al. (1988), with corrections as explained in the survey of lists of mnemonics.

Some signs in the Unicode set of hieroglyphs are merely combinations of other signs. With the Revised Encoding Scheme (RES), introduced by M.-J. Nederhof (2002), most of these composite signs become superfluous. Moreover, the appearance in a font is likely to deviate from what one finds in a text. For this reason, these signs should be replaced by RES expressions containing only atomic signs. Also signs should not be used that result from rotation by degrees other than 90, 180 or 270. Again, this is because occurrences of rotated signs in texts are likely to deviate from the fixed rotation in a font. We make an exception however for signs that obtain a different meaning upon rotation, as automatic processing becomes easier if signs with distinct meanings are encoded separately.

Relatively harmless are signs that result by stacking or insertion. An advantage of using such composite signs is that the relative positioning and scaling may have been fine-tuned to the exact shapes of the individual signs in the font. Also harmless are signs that result from rotation by 90, 180 or 270 degrees.

The table indicates by 'deprecated' which signs should not be used, and alternatives are provided. Alternatives are also proposed for composite signs that are not deprecated. In all of these cases, the offered alternatives are merely examples of RES expressions that could be substituted for the original signs; fine-tuning may be desired for individual occurrences in texts.

The signs marked by 'confirmed' are non-compositional in meaning, and although they can be rendered in terms of other signs, this is discouraged, as it would complicate automatic processing of encodings. In this class, we also include some signs that would be hard to render in an adequate way as a composition of signs, such as G11a G11a, M7 M7, O1a O1a.

References are to the following publications:

• J. Buurman et al. (1988), Inventaire des signes hieroglyphiques en vue de leur saisie informatique. Paris: Institut de France.
• M.-J. Nederhof (2002), A Revised Encoding Scheme for Hieroglyphic. Proceedings of the XIV Computer-aided Egyptology Round Table, Pisa, Italy.