Semantic classifiers (determinatives) and categorization in the ancient Egyptian writing system: Rules, list of classifiers, and studies by iClassifier on the Story of Sinuhe

Abstract

In the last two decades, we have extensively explored the semantic classifiers in ancient Egyptian scripts, showing how they encode the world from two complementary perspectives: universal cognitive tendencies of classification along with Egyptian society's categorization of the world. Our central hypothesis is that each graphemic classifier in the Egyptian writing system heads a conceptual category. The assemblage of words classified by a particular classifier presents us with a dynamic map of an emic category in the mind of a culture. Classifiers in the Egyptian script allow us to trace central and marginal members of conceptual categories, spot interrelations and overlaps between categories, observe diachronic developments and changes, and discover incompatibility of categories. The number of classifier occurrences in complex script systems amounts to millions (i.e., big data). In the last decade, we developed in the ArchaeoMind Lab the digital tool iClassifier 1 (© Goldwasser, Harel, and Nikolaev) designed to check our hypothesis on a large scope of texts from different periods and different scripts. We mark classifiers in imported digitalized corpora—in ancient Chinese, ancient Egyptian, and Sumerian cuneiform. This contribution introduces the reader to the rules of the classifier system in the Egyptian script and presents new results from a pilot project on a genuine Egyptian corpus (variants of the Story of Sinuhe).