TLA

The “Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae” (TLA) is an open access website and is the main publication platform for the texts and their linked vocabulary of the research project “Structure and transformation in the vocabulary of the Egyptian language”, that is jointly conducted by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) and the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities at Leipzig (SAW). The website was originally designed and developed for the projects “Dictionary of Ancient Egyptian” (BBAW, 1993–2012, and SAW, 1999–2012) and “Demotic Text Database” (Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, 2001–2012) that went online in 2004. It contains a wide variety of ancient Egyptian texts written in hieroglyphs, hieratic and Demotic. The database can be consulted starting from individual words (in Egyptian, or in German and English translation) or from the entire text. It also enables the production of word indexes and the execution of statistical functions.

The TLA in its version from 2015 is the largest Egyptian text database in the world and comprises 1.4 million text words. Apart from the texts of the Academy projects, it also includes many texts provided by other researchers and research institutions in Germany and from abroad: North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Bonn Book of the Dead project), Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Göttingen (Edfu Temple project) and individual researchers at the Universities of Leipzig (Digital Heka project), Leuven (Leuven Online Index of Ptolemaic and Roman Hieroglyphic Texts) und Prague (Middle Kingdom Biographies).

An updated version of the TLA with a redesigned front end was published on October 31, 2022. The relaunch of the new TLA not only makes the text data entered since 2015 available to the public. The site's functionality has also been optimized and expanded. For example, the text information is not limited to the transcription as before, but also offers annotations on grammatical forms in addition to the hieroglyphic spelling.