Egyptian — The Egyptologist

The Egyptologist — hieroglyphs to Coptic, one language across four millennia of script.

The Egyptian-Coptic continuum: the TLA corpora and word list (tla-hf, aes, aed), the Coptic lexicon with its egy-cop crosswalk, and Coptic Scriptorium.

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The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these nine answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Source	Holds	License	Status	Holdings (as of 7 November 2026)
`aed`	dictionary	attribution	wired · manual	35,052 entries
`aes`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	26,011 docs / 202,426 passages
`ccl`	dictionary	attribution	wired · manual	11,284 entries
`coptic-scriptorium`	texts	nc	wired · auto	502 docs / 74,778 passages
`edubba-overlay`	feature module	attribution	wired · manual	nothing held yet
`elephantine`	papyri & ostraca	attribution	wired · manual	15,539 docs / 69,350 passages
`tla-hf`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	6 docs / 59,524 passages
`ud`	treebank	nc	wired · manual	83 docs / 329,980 passages
`unikemet`	feature module	open	wired · manual	nothing held yet

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 7 November 2026): egy 51,131 · ger 12,985 · cop 12,242 · eng 4,861 · grc 3,311 · egy-Egyd 1,424 · arc 1,189 · ara 962 · und 168 · phn 94 … and 5 more (nabu axis egyptian lists all).

Carried in by multilingual packs (ud — whole-source members whose other languages ride along, as of 7 November 2026): orv 9 · ota 5 · lzh 4 · frm 3 · fro 3 … and 16 more (nabu axis egyptian lists all).

The desk’s instruments

The hieroglyph-to-Coptic continuum: the TLA corpora and word list (tla-hf, aes, aed), the Coptic lexicon with its egy-cop crosswalk (ccl), and Coptic Scriptorium (the complete Sahidic and Bohairic NT, gold-lemmatized).
The contact facet: Coptic Scriptorium is the --loans shelf, with 131K+ Greek loan tokens tagged — search --loans grc and list coptic-scriptorium --loans read them.
Alignment work: Coptic Scriptorium supplies the two Coptic columns of the nt work.

Working the egyptian desk

The generic desk surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable egyptian               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync egyptian                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis egyptian          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis egyptian                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis egyptian   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

This desk’s own surfaces:

nabu search ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ --lang cop --loans grc  # Coptic passages that carry a Greek loanword
nabu list coptic-scriptorium --loans grc  # the most loan-saturated Coptic documents
nabu align "MARK 2.3"                 # the Sahidic and Bohairic columns of the verse
nabu define ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ                     # the Coptic lexicon, following the egy-cop crosswalk

Ask your model

With the MCP server connected, this desk answers conversational research questions. Each example ran live against this library:

“Search the Egyptian sentences for nfr.” → nabu_search nfr (lang: egy) — AES hits in Egyptological transliteration (tomb inscriptions, offering lists) — ꜣ and ꜥ fold to a, so an ASCII query reaches them.

Terminal setup

Coptic: nabu strips nothing; install font-noto-sans-coptic (Coptic is LTR, so no bidi toggle).
Hieroglyphic TLA text: display.md names no hieroglyph font — read it through the TLA transcription rather than expecting glyph rendering.

The full guidance, per script, is on the display page.

One of the 30 research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.