In the field of Ancient Egyptian studies, the system of writing in hieratic script still remains largely misunderstood. This situation, in our opinion, is mainly caused by the attitude of Egyptologists toward the hieratic script. Although the hieratic writing system and its sign usage are different from those of hieroglyphics, and even though there does not exist a one-to-one correspondence in signs between hieratic signs and hieroglyphs, most Egyptologists tend to transliterate hieratic texts into hieroglyphs. Needless to say those transliterated hieroglyphic texts are not real material, but mere artificial substitutions.

To improve this situation, our team, the Digital Humanity Project of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Tsukuba University in Japan, decided to construct a web-based database for hieratic texts. As the first step, we set out to create a digital database of Papyrus Abbott (BM EA10221) with the permission and help of the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan of the British Museum.

Access to the database is restricted to authorized users for academic use. Please contact us if you are interested in our database.

Dr. Masakatsu NAGAI
1 August, 2012

Members
Chief director: Dr. Masakatsu NAGAI (Linguist, Ancient Egyptian), Assistant Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tsukuba.
System director: Dr. Toshihito WAKI (Linguist, Japanese Language / Database Engineering), Associate Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tsukuba.
Assistant: Yona TAKAHASHI, M.A. (Linguist, XML), Researcher, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tsukuba.

Acknowledgments
＊The copyright of all the photographs of BM EA10221 belongs to the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan of the British Museum.
＊This work is supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Grant Number 24520452.