From the Sunday Herald: Egypt's secrets are revealed ... in five seconds.
Posted on November 25, 2002 12:17 PM. Filed under: language.Cracking the ancient code of hieroglyphics was once considered one of the greatest feats of cryptology. But thanks to a group of academics from Scotland the secrets of the Pharaohs are set to be revealed in a matter of seconds.
In a bid to replace the time- consuming techniques currently available to translate the ancient scripts, computer experts at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen are developing a program that will allow tourists and archaeologists to understand the texts from inside the tomb itself.
A digital photo of a hieroglyph can be taken with a mobile phone, sent to a computer and translated into English in seconds. Previously Egyptologists have had to manually match each hieroglyph with a translation using word-processing materials. Because there are more than 4700 known glyphs -- including almost 800 basic ones, of which some 400 are considered common -- this has always been a lengthy and laborious task.
'We are taking one of the oldest languages in the world and turning it into the newest -- that of the computer,' said Dr Nik Whitehead, head of the research team.'Once it is in the computer you can translate it instantly, making it accessible to everyone. The potential for academics -- or whetting people's appetite for ancient Egypt -- is huge,' she added. [continue]