Welcome to the polychrome hieroglyph research project!
This website displays the preliminary results of ongoing research
currently carried out at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium,
into the use and meaning of colour in Egyptian hieroglyphic
inscriptions.
It is powered by a database of polychrome hieroglyphs which at present contains over 3500 occurrences of individual signs.
Uniquely amongst the earliest writing systems, the Egyptian
hieroglyphic script was sometimes enhanced by colouring the signs.
This was not done in an arbitrary fashion, but was conventional,
with each colour used in a conscious attempt either at materialism,
naturalism, semi-naturalism or as a metaphor.
This study aims to shed some light on the processes involved in
writing in colour.
The project clearly shows that a polychrome canon was in use, in a
remarkably coherent and stable fashion, during some two thousand five
hundred years, from the Old Kingdom right through to the Ptolemaic
period.
The AWOL Index: The bibliographic data presented herein has been programmatically extracted from the content of AWOL - The Ancient World Online (ISSN 2156-2253) and formatted in accordance with a structured data model.
AWOL is a project of Charles E. Jones, Tombros Librarian for Classics and Humanities at the Pattee Library, Penn State University
AWOL began with a series of entries under the heading AWOL on the Ancient World Bloggers Group Blog. I moved it to its own space here beginning in 2009.
The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.
The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.
AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.
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