You Could Soon Be Able to Text with 2,000 Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs
- 2018-05-11
- Open Culture
Growing up, I had a box set of Egyptian hieroglyphic stamps from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For a few weeks I used it to write coded letters to a friend, possessed of the same box set, who lived elsewhere in the neighborhood.
But Unicode itself, the industry-standard system for digitally encoding, representing, and handling text in the various writing systems of the world, may soon expand to include more than 2,000 hieroglyphics.
During that time under Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies, and the Roman Empire, "the language grew, changed, and diversified over the course of thousands of years, a fact which can now be reflected through its digital encoding.