1
Unicode Control Characters for Ancient EgyptianMark-Jan Nederhof
Stéphane Polis
Serge Rosmorduc

Draft chapter for handbook, formatting 7th January 2021.

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2Mark-Jan Nederhof Stéphane Polis Serge Rosmorduc

1.1 The Unicode Standard
Unicode offers a universal solution to text encoding (Korpela, 2006). As of version 13 (2020), theUnicode standard comprises 143,859 characters in altogether 154 modern and ancient scripts.
Different scripts can alternate within a single document by virtue of the assignment of a unique
number, or code point, to each character. Unicode characters are ‘abstract’ in the sense that
their exact appearance is not fixed: an italic ‘A’ in Helvetica and a bold ‘A’ in Times Roman
correspond to the same code point. Font families, font styles and font weights are determinedby higher-level protocols that are used in combination with Unicode, such as HTML and CSS in
the case of web pages or RTF for word processors.
Some Unicode characters do not result in a visual appearance on their own, but control
formatting or modify the rendering of other characters. These are known as control characters.
Common examples are the line feed and the horizontal tab. Control characters of a very different
kind, which allow positioning of hieroglyphic signs with respect to one another, are the topic of
this article.
Thanks to Unicode, a large number of fonts can be used for a wide range of applications.
Copy-and-paste functionality allows transfer of text between applications, including web pages
and documents prepared using common word processors. Search engines on the Web and searchfunctionality of word processors and databases such as Word and Framemaker rely on Unicode.

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1 Unicode Control Characters for Ancient Egyptian3

1.2 Digital Encoding of Egyptian Texts
A popular format to encode Ancient Egyptian texts is the Manuel de Codage (MdC) (Buurman
et al., 1988), most notably in the implementation of JSesh.1 Another such encoding format is
PLOTTEXT (Stief, 1985b,a, 1988, 2001). The initial motivation for the MdC and PLOTTEXT
was to prepare printed publications. It is now widely used for text corpora as well, such as Ramses
Online 2 and the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae 3 . However, electronic corpora and interchange of
textual resources between different projects have requirements that diverge quite significantly
from the ones of printed editions (Nederhof, 2013). Moreover, with the current technical solutions,common word processors need to be used in combination with tools such as JSesh in order toincorporate hieroglyphic texts as images within documents.
Conversely, Unicode has a number of inherent limitations that seem to preclude its use insome areas of Egyptology. For example, the notion of abstract character implies that details of appearance cannot be part of the encoding, which hinders applications in palaeography. Moreover,arbitrary fine-tuning in terms of scaling and positioning, as is often done in publication of Egyptian texts, is beyond the capabilities of common font technologies such as OpenType. Nonetheless,there are many potential applications of Unicode in the fields of lexical and morpho-syntactic
studies, for instance, as well as in transfer of textual resources between different individuals,
projects, and tools.

1

http://jseshdoc.qenherkhopeshef.org
http://ramses.ulg.ac.be/3
http://aaew.bbaw.de/tla/index.html
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4Mark-Jan Nederhof Stéphane Polis Serge Rosmorduc

1.3 Control Characters for Egyptian
Since Unicode 5.2 (2009) there are 1071 code points of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. These code
points by themselves have been of limited use, as until recently no mechanism was available tocompose signs into actual hieroglyphic text as it appears in original inscriptions, with signs next
to one another, above one another, or in other spatial arrangements.
An early Unicode proposal to add control characters for Ancient Egyptian took three primitives from the MdC tradition (Richmond & Glass, 2016). These were the horizontal joiner ‘*’,which arranges signs next to one another, the vertical joiner ‘:’, which arranges signs (or horizontally joined groups) above one another, and a ligature joiner ‘+’ for any other arrangementsof signs. The latter was not in the original MdC but in the form of ‘&’ it has been widely usedsince the release of WinGlyph (van den Berg, 1993, 1997).
The proposal attracted criticism for several reasons (Nederhof et al., 2016b). First, different
users can very well attribute different meanings to ‘+’. This violates the main aim of Unicode,
which is the interchange of encodings without introducing ambiguity. Second, vertical groups ofsigns could not be combined into a larger group using the horizontal joiner, which meant thatmany common groups could not be encoded, unless one resorted to use of the catch-all ‘+’, which
is problematic as it is. Lastly, there was an implicit assumption that all valid/attested groups ofsigns could be enumerated and stored in precomposed form in a font.
Subsequent proposals addressed these issues (Nederhof et al., 2016a, 2017; Glass et al., 2017).
To find an alternative to ‘+’, ideas were taken from PLOTTEXT, which has six primitives thatallow a (group of) sign(s) to be ‘inserted’ at empty spaces in or around a bigger sign. Four ofthese primitives, henceforth called ‘corner insertions’, insert a group within one of four corners of
the bigger sign. A fifth primitive inserts a group just above the feet of the bigger sign, assuming
this is a bird. A sixth primitive, a ‘center insertion’, inserts a group within another sign. Thiswas specifically intended for h.w.t enclosures.
Primitives akin to corner insertion exist in other types of encoding next to PLOTTEXT.
E.g. MacScribe (Gozzoli, 2013) added two binary operators to the MdC tradition, each of whichinserts a group of signs into a particular zone immediately next to a base sign. Such a zone
is typically an empty corner of the base sign, or the empty space above the feet of a bird. A
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limitation is that each sign can have at most two zones, and what these zones are needs to be
specified for each sign individually.
A more general and more precisely defined solution is offered by RES.4 It allows insertion
into one of the four corners, into one of the four sides, or in the middle of a bigger sign. It isalso possible to insert a group within a group. Furthermore, one may manually adjust the (x, y)
coordinates where the insertion is to take place. Another innovative feature is that the renderingof the insertion depends on the exact contours of the signs: the inserted group is gradually scaled
up from 0 until a given minimal distance is reached between it and the larger sign. This distanceis the default distance between signs and groups, but it can also be manually adjusted. If the
distance is set to 0, then the inserted group is scaled up (and where applicable moved up/downor left/right) until it fits snugly between the larger sign and the bounding box around it.
The four corner insertions of PLOTTEXT were adopted in Unicode. If the base sign is a bird,
then the lower-left corner insertion places the inserted group above its feet, and thereby fulfils
the role of the fifth insertion primitive of PLOTTEXT. An ‘overlay’ control character was also
adopted, which renders one sign, or one group of signs, on top of one another. Lastly, a pair ofcontrol characters was introduced that act as parentheses. This allows horizontal and verticalgroupings, as well as corner insertions, to be nested, in principle to arbitrary depth, although
in practice the maximum depth of nesting may be limited by the font. Efforts were initiatedto design OpenType fonts that do not rely on enumerating groups of signs, but that interpretcontrol characters dynamically. In this way, fonts will be able to render groups of signs that were
not seen before.
Examples of groups in Unicode (all taken from Section 1.4.) are presented in Table 1.1: (a) the
horizontal joiner binds more tightly than the vertical joiner; (b) a pair of parentheses is requiredfor vertical groups that are combined with the horizontal joiner; (c-f) there can be insertions in
multiple corners; (g) corner insertions bind more tightly than the horizontal and vertical joiners;(h-i) a pair of parentheses is required for vertical or horizontal groups or other corner insertions
that are themselves inserted in a corner; (j) there can be corner insertions in an overlay.

4

http://mjn.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/egyptian/res/

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6Mark-Jan Nederhof Stéphane Polis Serge Rosmorduc :  *(a)   ⇐ ⇐(e)  ⇐  ⇐(g) 

(i) 
 ⇐

(c)




 
 : *( ) :  * (  :  )(d)  ⇐ (f) ⇐   (  :  *  )(h)  ⇐(j)  ⇐  (b)   ⇐Table 1.1. Encodings of hieroglyphic text in Unicode.

The Unicode repertoire of nine control characters for Ancient Egyptian was informed bystudies of composition of signs (Fischer, 1977; Meeks, 2017; Polis, 2018) and was chosen to
specifically satisfy the following requirements:(1) Each control character must have a meaning that is simple, well-defined and stable. This
ensures that encodings preserve their validity over time and can be transferred between
projects and tools without introducing ambiguity. However, there is some freedom in how
a font could realize the scaling and positioning of signs. For example, the exact distance
between signs in a horizontal or vertical group is not specified.
(2) The repertoire of control characters must cover the main types of spatial arrangements observed in hieroglyphic and hieratic texts from different periods. To be more exact, the appearance of an original inscription and the appearance obtained by rendering its encoding
must be similar enough for most users to agree that they are the same text. In Section 1.4
we assess to what extent this requirement is currently fulfilled.
(3) The control characters can be implemented in modern font technology, in particular OpenType. This is discussed further in Section 1.5.
(4) Encodings can be effectively searched for patterns of signs and specific spatial arrangements.
It should be noted that if one were to introduce atomic code points for complex groups ofsigns, it would become easy to achieve an encoding for each known text with few or no control
characters, as implementation of additional code points in itself is straightforward. However,
the encoding standard as a whole would then become unwieldy and unstable as more suchcode points are added for newly considered texts, and search functionality becomes close to

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impossible to implement. The best compromise therefore appears to be a small repertoire of
powerful control characters, reducing the need for atomic encoding of composed and transformed
signs to a minimum.

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8Mark-Jan Nederhof Stéphane Polis Serge RosmorducJames (1961), Hieroglyphic texts from Egyptian stelae, etc., Part I
Pl. 16

Pl. 13

Pl. 14

Pl. 21Pl. 34

Pl. 36

(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
(f)
Lloyd et al. (2008), Saqqâra tombs III: The mastaba of Neferseshemptah
Pl. 5

Pl. 5

Pl. 5

Pl. 13

Pl. 6

Pl. 18

(g)
(h)
(i)
(j)
(k)
(l)
Ishkander & Goelet (2015), The Temple of Ramesses II in Abydos, Volume 1
Pl. 3.1.59

Pl. 3.1.59

Pl. 3.1.61

Pl. 2.2.28

Pl. 2.2.30

(m)
(n)
(o)
(p)
(q)
Biston-Moulin & Thiers (2016), Le temple de Ptah à Karnak
P. 66

(s)

P. 66

(t)

P. 6

(u)

P. 32

(v)

P. 32

(w)

(r)

P. 32

(x)

Pl. 2.2.32

P. 41

(y)

P. 48

(z)

Table 1.2. Groups of signs from a diachronic sample of texts.

1.4 Adequacy
To critically assess the coverage of the control characters currently available in Unicode, monumental inscriptions from the Old Kingdom (Lloyd et al., 2008; James, 1961), the New Kingdom(Ishkander & Goelet, 2015), and the Ptolemaic era (Biston-Moulin & Thiers, 2016) were investigated, with texts written in lines and in columns, and left-to-right or right-to-left.
Table 1.2 exemplifies all the types of encodings discussed in Section 1.3. Groups such as (q)and (z) abound that illustrate that vertical groups can occur inside horizontal groups, which canthemselves be part of vertical groups, etc. Examples such as (v) further show that there is no
obvious limitation to the number of signs that can be grouped using the horizontal and verticaljoiners.
Examples of corner insertion are widespread and include those discussed before, viz. (g), (mp) and (r-s), as well as (h) and (w). In (t), a group with bottom-right corner insertion is inserted
in the bottom-left corner of another sign. Groups such as (j) and (k) can also be analyzed ascorner insertions.

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Currently missing from Unicode is a center insertion, which would be required for groups suchas (e) and (y). It is further common for low/wide signs and high/narrow signs to be rotated bya quarter turn if that makes them fit better in the composition of a group. Some signs may also
be rotated by half a turn without this changing their meaning, as for example the crescent moonin (n). In addition, signs may be mirrored horizontally, sometimes in order to create meaningful
visual interactions with other signs, and sometimes because they have no clear front or back, asin (l). Hence both rotation and mirroring would be desiderata among further Unicode controls.
Finally, a frequent phenomenon in Ancient Egyptian inscriptions is that neighbouring groups
are squeezed together to reduce the amount of empty space, as for example in (a), (b), (d),(f), (i), (u) and (x). This may be called kerning, by analogy with the concept of this name inmodern typography. What is different here is that this squeezing together generally involves apair of neighbouring groups, rather than a pair of neighbouring characters. As a consequence,
this form of kerning is beyond the capabilities of modern font technology, and a solution is not
likely to be found within the framework of Unicode. If encoding of kerning is required, one mustcurrently resort to more specialized technology such as RES, which realizes kerning dynamicallyby analyzing the contours of signs.

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10Mark-Jan Nederhof Stéphane Polis Serge Rosmorduc

Table 1.3. OpenType font for hieroglyphic text rendered in Firefox.

1.5 Implementation
Signs within a group are scaled and positioned depending on sizes of other signs. Ideally thisinvolves arithmetic and dynamic scaling, which are outside the capabilities of OpenType. However, arithmetic can to some extent be simulated by OpenType’s features, and a font may containseveral precompiled scalings of each sign (Nederhof et al., 2017). Recently, much progress along
these lines has been made by Andrew Glass (Glass, 2020).
In addition, open-source code is available to automatically construct a font that can handle
all groups within a given corpus.5 Table 1.3 demonstrates such a font in a web page. The disadvantage of this approach is that the font needs to be regenerated each time the corpus isextended.
Lastly, there is open-source code to render encodings in webpages in terms of HTML canvas,
implemented using an existing framework for RES, whose functionality subsumes that of theUnicode control characters.6 This also includes an online graphical editor.7

5

https://github.com/nederhof/opentypehierohttps://github.com/nederhof/resjs
7
https://mjn.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/egyptian/res/js/edit_uni.html
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1.6 Outlook
As stated above, it is our hope that future versions of Unicode will include center insertion,
rotation, and mirroring. Furthermore, encoding of cartouches and other enclosures still awaits
a permanent solution. As complete and undamaged texts are the exception within corpora ofancient inscriptions, further desiderata are primitives for lacunas and shading.
The work reported here on the control characters should be envisioned as complementary to
the extension of the repertoire of hieroglyphic signs in Unicode. We advocate a drastic change ofdirection here: actual attestations of signs (with an analysis of their iconic features and functions
in context) should be at the center of the definition of any new code points. Such an endeavour
can be supported by the Thot Sign List 8 , an open digital repertoire of hieroglyphic signs (Poliset al., 2020).

8

http://thotsignlist.org/

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12Mark-Jan Nederhof Stéphane Polis Serge Rosmorduc

Acknowledgements
The ongoing work reported here involves many other colleagues, most notably Andrew Glass,
Simon Schweitzer, and Daniel Werning. Pivotal has been the assistance of Deborah Anderson.

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References
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van den Berg, H. (1997), Manuel de Codage: A standard system for the computer-encoding of Egyptian
transliteration and hieroglyphic texts, http://www.catchpenny.org/codage/, accessed 2020-12-11.
Biston-Moulin, S. & C. Thiers (2016), Le temple de Ptah à Karnak, volume 49 of Bibliothèque générale,
Institut français d’archéologie orientale, Le Caire.
Buurman, J., N. Grimal, M. Hainsworth, J. Hallof, & D. van der Plas (1988), Inventaire des signes
hiéroglyphiques en vue de leur saisie informatique – Informatique et Égyptologie 2, Institut de France,
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Fischer, H.G. (1977), The evolution of composite hieroglyphs in Ancient Egypt, Metropolitan Museum
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Glass, A. (2020), Cluster model for Egyptian hieroglyphic quadrats, http://www.unicode.org/L2/
L2020/20176-hierogyph-cluster.pdf.
Glass, A., I. Hafemann, M.-J. Nederhof, S. Polis, B. Richmond, S. Rosmorduc, & S. Schweitzer(2017), A method for encoding Egyptian quadrats in Unicode, http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17112r-quadrat-encoding.pdf.
Gozzoli, R.B. (2013), Hieroglyphic text processors, Manuel de Codage, Unicode, and lexicography, in
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Korpela, J.K. (2006), Unicode Explained, O’Reilly.
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Nederhof, M.-J., V. Rajan, J. Lang, S. Polis, S. Rosmorduc, T.S. Richter, I. Hafemann, & S. Schweitzer(2016a), A comprehensive system of control characters for Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic text (preliminary version), http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16177-egyptian.pdf.
Nederhof, M.-J., V. Rajan, J. Lang, S. Polis, S. Rosmorduc, T.S. Richter, I. Hafemann, & S. Schweitzer(2017), A system of control characters for Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic text (updated version),
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L2016/16090-comment-ctl-char-egyptian.pdf.
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Polis, S., L. Desert, P. Dils, J. Grotenhuis, V. Razanajao, T.S. Richter, S. Rosmorduc, S.D. Schweitzer,
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