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.

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 19 September 2026): egy 51,130 · ger 12,985 · cop 12,222 · eng 4,861 · grc 3,311 · egy-Egyd 1,424 · arc 1,189 · ara 962 · und 168 · phn 94 … and 20 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 axis 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 twenty-five research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.