About the Egyptian Inscriptions Database
A unified, georeferenced catalogue of 193,867 ancient Egyptian objects and 60,913 inscriptions, assembled from 25 source projects. Built for researchers and serious enthusiasts who want an artifact's full context across institutions, not just one museum's record of it.
How to read a record
This database aggregates and enriches other projects' data, so it is explicit about where every fact comes from. On each object page you will see, clearly distinguished:
- From the source institution (authoritative): accession, description, dimensions, dating, and a link back to the original catalogue record.
- AI-inferred (machine-generated, may be wrong): the image-analysis panel reading deities, royal names, materials, and signs from the object's photograph.
- Approximate location: most map points sit at the site centroid, not the exact findspot, and are labelled as such.
- Inferred links: cross-references we matched ourselves (rather than ones stated by the source) carry their match method and a confidence tier.
The goal is trust-but-verify: take what is useful and stay one click from the canonical source. Found an error? Use the Feedback button on any page.
Sources and modalities
The corpus draws on three distinct kinds of source:
- Text corpora — the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (Berlin) for hieroglyphic lemmas with Manuel-de-Codage transliteration and Trismegistos for the cross-source spine of text and place IDs.
- Museum catalogues — the Metropolitan Museum, British Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Fitzwilliam, ISAC Chicago, Smithsonian, Manchester, and Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden. Their records carry accession numbers, curator descriptions, sometimes Wikidata Q-IDs, and (when present) inscription transcriptions.
- Excavation archives — the Egypt Exploration Society's Tell el-Amarna corpus (7,386 Petrie-grid-anchored objects) and the Papyri.info federation (DDB texts, HGV metadata, APIS institutional records).
Inscriptions land in any of three content modalities, side-by-side on the same row: hieroglyphic transcription (MdC; sometimes Greek/Coptic/Arabic for non-pharaonic text), English-prose curator description, or structured sign-name vocabulary as JSON.
The cross-source spine
Every object carries cross-references to other sources where the same physical artifact appears. Trismegistos-Text IDs are primary — a single TM-Text ID can stitch together a DDB papyrus edition, its HGV metadata record, and an APIS or museum-collection photograph of the original. The corpus today has 560,914 cross-references across all link types, of which the TM spine accounts for the research-critical bridges.
AI analysis
Objects with directly-fetchable images go through a structured vision-AI pass (GPT-4o). The model identifies deities, royal cartouches, materials, visible hieroglyphic signs (with Gardiner codes when applicable), and transcribes any plainly-visible text. 6,327 images have been analyzed so far. Output is stored as structured JSON and surfaces on each object's detail page in the AI panel.
Inscriptions that have a transcription but no scholarly English translation are also passed through an AI translator (likewise GPT-4o). AI-generated translations are flagged in blue on the object page; scholarly translations from the source materials are flagged in ochre.
Schema
The canonical schema is documented in
docs/schema_v1.md.
Postgres with the pgvector and PostGIS extensions; 1,536-dim OpenAI
embeddings on every inscription for cross-modality semantic search;
EPSG-4326 points on objects and excavation contexts for the map view.
Reuse and citation
Every object has a stable URL: /object/{id}. Inscription
and translation content carries the source's license at the source-table
level — see the Sources page for per-source
licensing. The database itself is a research aggregation; cite the
individual source for any specific record, and this site as the
aggregator if useful.