The Archaeology of the Mind Lab
PI Prof. Orly Goldwasser

The Archaeology of the Mind Lab studies how different cultures, past and present, organize knowledge about the world.

Members of our team presented research done at the lab with the iClassifier research tool in the International Congress of Egyptology, ICE @ at Leiden:

Orly Goldwasser and Yanru Xu. Ancient Chinese and Ancient Egyptian Scripts – New Comparative Interdisciplinary Research.

Susana Soler. New Vista on ‘The Story of Sinuhe’: A Corpus-Based Study of the Classifier System by the Digital Research Platform iClassifier.

Haleli Harel. Categories of Lexical Innovation in New Kingdom Egypt: A Categorical Semantic Network.

Svenja Stern and Tanja Pommerening

e(bers)Classifier - digital analysis of papyrus Ebers

Jorke Grotenhuis. Digitizing Seth: digital studies of Sethian hieroglyphs in the Coffin Texts.

Special issue of the Journal of Chinese Writing Systems, Classifiers in Ancient Scripts.
Edited by Orly Goldwasser and Zev Handel (2024)

Including an introduction by the editors and three articles presenting the Egyptian, Sumerian, and Chinese classifier systems, followed by an article showcasing the methodology carried out by the iClassifier tool.

Gebhard J. Selz and Bo Zhang.
“Classification in Sumerian Cuneiform.”

Yanru Xu.
"Semantic classifiers in Guodian bamboo manuscripts: Reconstructing categories in the ancient Chinese mind."

Orly Goldwasser and Susana Soler.
“Semantic Classifiers and Categorization in the Ancient Egyptian Writing System: Rules, List of Classifiers, and Studies by iClassifier on the ‘Story of Sinuhe.”

Haleli Harel, Orly Goldwasser & Dmitry Nikolaev. “iClassifier: A Digital Research Tool for Corpus-based Classifier Networks.”

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New paper: Towards automatic tagging of classifiers, using training data collected in iClassifier datasets

Nikolaev, Dmitry, Jorke Grotenhuis, Haleli Harel and Orly Goldwasser.

2024. Classifier identification in Ancient Egyptian as a low-resource sequence-labelling task. ML4AL 2024 (First Machine Learning for Ancient Languages Workshop).

Download link:

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.00475.

Ancient Egyptian
Sumerian
Ancient Chinese
Anatolian Hieroglyphs

Corpus-based
classifier networks

© Goldwasser/Harel/Nikolaev

Mindmapping of ancient cultures

The evolution of Egyptian hieroglyphic classifiers resembles the evolution of birds’ wings. Feathers were initially for thermal insulation and display; only later did they begin assisting with flight. Analogously, classifiers served limited functions at first—reference tracking and disambiguation—but evolved over time to serve new functions. Without feathers, birds could not have developed the ability to fly. Similarly, classifiers opened the door to complex categorization, priming the mental lexicon of the reader. Wings allow birds to fly high and survey vast landscapes; classifiers enable us to observe the landscape of the Ancient Egyptian mind.

Current research in the lab

A classifier network of lexical borrowings in New Kingdom texts

Harel, Haleli. 2023. A Network of Lexical Borrowings in Egyptian Texts
of the New Kingdom: Organizing Knowledge according to the Classifier System.
Doctoral dissertation. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

(to be published in a digital format)

Blue lines link classifiers and lemmas (=words) they occur with.

Red lines link classifiers that co-occur with a host lemma.

Click the image to zoom into a detail.

A classifier network of Sumerian, based on the ePSD2 database.
Prof. Dr. Gebhard J. Selz. Data collected by Bo Zhang in iClassifier.

Selz, Gebhard. 2021. “Appositive semantic classification in Sumerian Cuneiform and the implementation of iClassifier.” Ash-sharq: Bulletin of the Ancient Near East 6, 142–171.

Selz, Gebhard J. and Bo Zhang. 2024. “Classification in Sumerian Cuneiform.” Special issue of the Journal of Chinese Writing Systems, Classifiers in Ancient Scripts.

A classifier network of the Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts

Jorke Grotenhuis. Digitizing Seth: digital studies of Sethian hieroglyphs in the Coffin Texts. Presentation at the 13th International Congress of Egyptology, Leiden, August 2023.

Blue lines link classifiers and lemmas (=words) they occur with.

Red lines link classifiers that co-occur with a host lemma.

Click the image to zoom into a detail.

A classifier network of the Tale of Sinuhe

Soler, Susana. Forthcoming. Classifiers in Ancient Egyptian Scripts. A Corpus-Based Analysis of a Literary Text: the Story of Sinuhe. Doctoral dissertation. Supervised by Orly Goldwasser and Ignasi-Xavier Adiego Lajara.

Orly Goldwasser and Susana Soler. 2024. “Semantic Classifiers and Categorization in the Ancient Egyptian Writing System: Rules, List of Classifiers, and Studies by iClassifier on the ‘Story of Sinuhe.”

Blue lines link classifiers and lemmas (=words) they occur with.

Red lines link classifiers that co-occur with a host lemma.

Click the image to zoom into a detail.

The Archaeology of the Mind Lab PI Prof. Orly Goldwasser

Ancient Egyptian Sumerian Ancient Chinese Anatolian Hieroglyphs Corpus-based classifier networks

© Goldwasser/Harel/Nikolaev

Mindmapping of ancient cultures

Current research in the lab

We digitize classifiers in scripts and languages using the iClassifier digital research platform

The Archaeology of the Mind Lab
PI Prof. Orly Goldwasser

Ancient Egyptian
Sumerian
Ancient Chinese
Anatolian Hieroglyphs

Corpus-based
classifier networks

We digitize classifiers in scripts and languages
using the iClassifier digital research platform