Dataset Card for Dataset tla-Late_Egyptian-v19-premium

This data set contains Late Egyptian sentences in hieroglyphs and transliteration, with lemmatization, with POS glossing and with a German translation. The data comes from the database of the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae, corpus version 19. This set of Late Egyptian sentences only contains text witnesses classified as "Late Egyptian" in the TLA corpus metadata. Moreover, it contains only fully intact, unambiguously readable sentences (3,606 of 12,361 sentences), adjusted for philological and editorial markup.

Dataset Details

Dataset Description

• Homepage: https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de.
• Curated by: German Academies’ project “Strukturen und Transformationen des Wortschatzes der ägyptischen Sprache. Text- und Wissenskultur im alten Ägypten”, Executive Editor: Daniel A. Werning.
• Funded by: The Academies’ project “Strukturen und Transformationen des Wortschatzes der ägyptischen Sprache. Text- und Wissenskultur im alten Ägypten” of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig is co-financed by the German federal government and the federal states Berlin and Saxony. The Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig is co-financed by the Saxon State government out of the State budget approved by the Saxon State Parliament.
• Language(s) (NLP): egy-Egyp, egy-Egyh, de-DE.
• License: CC BY-SA 4.0 Int.; for required attribution, see citation recommendations below.
• Point of Contact: Daniel A. Werning

Uses

Direct Use

This data set may be used

• to train translation models Egyptian hieroglyphs => Egyptological transliteration,
• to create lemmatizers Late Egyptian transliteration => TLA lemma ID,
• to train translation models Late Egyptian transliteration => German.

Out-of-Scope Use

This data set of selected intact sentences is not suitable for reconstructing entire ancient source texts.

Dataset

Dataset Structure

The dataset is not divided. Please create your own random splits.

The dataset comes as a JSON lines file.

Data Fields

plain_text

• hieroglyphs: a string, sequence of Egyptian hieroglyphs (Unicode v15), individual sentence elements separated by space.
• transliteration: a string, Egyptological transliteration, following the Leiden Unified Transliteration, individual sentence elements separated by space.
• lemmatization: a string, individual TLA Lemma IDs+"|"+lemma transliteration, separated by space.
• UPOS: a string, Part of Speech according to Universal POS tag set.
• glossing: a string, individual glosses of the inflected forms, separated by space (for information, see the comments below).
• translation: a string, German translation.
• dateNotBefore, dateNotAfter: two strings containing an integer or empty, terminus ante quem non and terminus post quem non for the text witness.

Data instances

Example of an dataset instance:

{
    "hieroglyphs": "𓈖𓄿𓇋𓇋𓏥 𓆑 𓇋𓄿𓏲𓏏𓊑𓄜𓏤𓏥 𓈖𓏏𓏭 𓅓 𓇋𓇋𓇋𓏏𓈇𓏤𓊖 𓅓𓍱𓏤𓏛",
    "transliteration": "nꜣy ⸗f ꞽꜣw.t.PL n.tꞽ m sḫ.t m-sšr",
    "lemmatization": "550008|nꜣy⸗ 10050|⸗f 35870|ꜥw.t 851214|n.tꞽ 400007|m 141480|sḫ.t 600392|m-sšr",
    "UPOS": "PRON PRON NOUN PRON ADP NOUN ADV",
    "glossing": "art.poss:pl -3sg.m N.f:pl REL:m.sg PREP N.f ADV",
    "translation": "Sein Kleinvieh, das auf dem Feld ist, ist in Ordnung.",
    "dateNotBefore": "-1279",
    "dateNotAfter": "-1213"
}

Dataset Creation

Curation Rationale

ML projects have requested raw data from the TLA. At the same time, the raw data is riddled with philological markers that make it difficult for non-Egyptological users. This is a strictly filtered data set that only contains intact, unquestionable, fully lemmatized sentences.

Source Data

For the corpus of Late Egyptian texts in the TLA, cf. the information on the TLA text corpus, notably the PDF overview.

Data Collection and Processing

This dataset contains all Late Egyptian sentences of the TLA corpus v19 (2024) that

• show no destruction,
• have no questionable readings,
• have hieroglyphs encoded,
• are fully lemmatized (and lemmata have a transliteration and a POS),
• have a German translation.

Who are the source data producers?

AV Altägyptisches Wörterbuch, AV Wortschatz der ägyptischen Sprache; project Deir el Medine online; Anke Blöbaum, R. Dominik Blöse, Marc Brose, Billy Böhm, Dominik Ceballos Contreras, Svenja Damm, Charlotte Dietrich, Peter Dils, Elizabeth Frood, Elsa Goerschel, Christine Greger, Roberto A. Díaz Hernández, Alexandra Hornung, Jakob Höper, Jessica Jancziak, Madeline Jenkins, Johannes Jüngling, Sabrina Karoui, Kay Christine Klinger, Florence Langermann, Lutz Popko, Joachim Friedrich Quack, Simon D. Schweitzer, Lisa Seelau, Gunnar Sperveslage, Katharina Stegbauer, Anja Weber, Daniel A. Werning.

Annotations

Annotation process

The transliteration sometimes contains round brackets (( )), which mark phonemes added by the editor without the addition being regarded as an incorrect omission. For model training, the brackets, but not their content, may optionally be removed.

The hieroglyphs sometimes contain glyphs that are not yet part of Unicode (notably v15). These are indicated by their code in JSesh, with additional codes/signs generated by the TLA project and marked by tags <g>...</g>.

Who are the annotators?

Project Deir el Medine online; Anke Blöbaum, Marc Brose, Billy Böhm, Dominik Ceballos Contreras, Svenja Damm, Charlotte Dietrich, Peter Dils, Elizabeth Frood, Elsa Goerschel, Christine Greger, Roberto A. Díaz Hernández, Alexandra Hornung, Jessica Jancziak, Madeline Jenkins, Johannes Jüngling, Sabrina Karoui, Kay Christine Klinger, Florence Langermann, Lutz Popko, Joachim Friedrich Quack, Simon D. Schweitzer, Lisa Seelau, Gunnar Sperveslage, Katharina Stegbauer, Anja Weber, Daniel A. Werning.

Personal and Sensitive Information

No personal, sensitive, or private data.

Bias, Risks, and Limitations

This is not a carefully balanced data set.

Note that the lemmatization is done via lemma IDs, since the lemma transliteration contains many consonantal homonyms due to the vowel-less nature of hieroglyphic writing.

Citation of this dataset

Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae, Late Egyptian sentences, corpus v19, premium, https://huggingface.co/datasets/thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae/tla-late_egyptian-v19-premium, v1.0, 1/19/2025 ed. by Tonio Sebastian Richter & Daniel A. Werning on behalf of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and Hans-Werner Fischer-Elfert & Peter Dils on behalf of the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig.

BibTeX:

@misc{tlaLateEgyptianV19premium,
 editor = {{Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften} and {Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig} and Richter, Tonio Sebastian and Werning, Daniel A. and Hans-Werner Fischer-Elfert and Peter Dils},
 year = {2025},
 title = {Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae, Late Egyptian sentences, corpus v19, premium},
 url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae/tla-late_lgyptian-v19-premium},
 location = {Berlin},
 organization = {{Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften} and {Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig}},
}

RIS:

TY  - DATA
T1  - Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae, Late Egyptian sentences, corpus v19, premium
PY  - 2025
Y1  - 2025
CY  - Berlin
ED  - Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
ED  - Richter, Tonio Sebastian
ED  - Werning, Daniel A.
ED  - Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig
ED  - Fischer-Elfert, Hans-Werner
ED  - Dils, Peter
IN  - Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
IN  - Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig
UR  - https://huggingface.co/datasets/thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae/tla-late_egyptian_original-v19-premium
DB  - Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae
DP  - Akademienvorhaben "Strukturen und Transformationen des Wortschatzes der ägyptischen Sprache", Berlin-Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
ER  -

Glossary

Lemma IDs

For the stable lemma IDs, see https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/info/lemma-lists.

Glossing

For the glossing abbreviations, see https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/listings/ling-glossings.

Note: The glosses correspond to the inflected grammatical forms in the very sentence.

Dataset Card Authors

Daniel A. Werning

Dataset Card Contact

Daniel A. Werning