Welcome to the world of the Rosette Project
News
October 2026: The Rosette Medjat Dictionary has been published. 5 volumes, 2680 pages, 98 Mb ZIP archive, and it is free.
September 2026: A Forum has been opened for discussions and bugs reports. Feel free to visit it.
This website is devoted to the study of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Far from pretending to master all the intricate subtleties that lie hidden within the writing of these signs, the aim of the Rosette Team is to gather from the ancient texts of Egypt as much detailed information as possible relating to their construction. Furthermore they aim to share with everyone some of the tools and techniques used in their successful translation, in order, at last, that they might better be able to understand them.
Why such an initiative?
Less than two centuries ago, thanks to the fortuitous discovery of the Rosetta stone made by our soldiers, the French scientist Jean François Champollion deciphered the mystery of the hieroglyphs, and so brought to an end more than a millennium of suspicion and speculation about this sacred writing.
Nowadays, while the barriers to an understanding of the ancient Egyptian texts disappear day by day for the experienced epigraphists, for those among us whose enthusiasm is more amateur, they remain in force. How does one provide a tool which will allow the larger majority of enthusiasts to penetrate the lack of understanding which surrounds these signs? How does one create a simple, user-friendly program software and make it available to everyone? This is what the Rosette Project is all about.
NB.: For easy navigation of this website, an online help is available in many pages across Rosette. You may find this assistance wherever you see the small icon, which represents a "scribe's palette", at the top-left of the page title.
The Rosette Project
Convinced that computer science can really help in this respect, a group of amateurs, all fond of egyptology, decided to embark upon this adventure. Armed, almost permantently, with communication through MSN Messenger (obsolete) and through our meetings "Jeudis de Rosette" and visits organized by Egyptos-Rosette in Paris and elsewhere, the Rosette Team is able to encompass a multitude of skills, provided by people of various ages and origins, and is now in a position to create something which can be of immense value.
For those people who may simply wish to visit and use the application, they do need to register. Most of the program functions are readily available. The user-registration plus becoming a member is required for certain advanced functions such as the translation of texts for the corpus.
Those among you who would like to contribute to the project, in whatever domain and with whatever skills, you are more than welcome. Please subscribe with a valid e-mail address and update your profile. You will receive an individual welcome-mail and will soon be in a position to join our team, should you so desire.
What are the supporting strengths of Rosette?
- Using a variety of sources the user is first able to capture a character string in Manuel de Codage format, he or she can then identify the Egyptian words from the program's dictionary. These can then be analysed within the program which then suggests a series of grammatically correct combinations for this sentence.
- A Catalogue of more than 3000 hieroglyphs, consistent wit the EGPZ Project as submitted for Unicode integration !
- A Dictionary which includes the full "Faulkner" wordlist and its counterpart in French the "Medjat" (5400 words in transliteration, 6400 semantic variants, more than 10,000 graphics) ...
- An Editor offering three different character fonts (Inscribe, Rosette-Mury, Ptah), consistent with the Manuel de Codage 1988, with some additional features.
- A Corpus of texts which is just waiting for your own contribution to help it grow. Already more than 270 texts are available in French, and many others are in preparation.
- Thematic search tools : phonetic correspondance, king list, ... and many others for you to discover by navigating in the menus "Something more" and "Documentation".
How to use Rosette ?
To use Rosette easily, here are few elementary concepts useful to bear in mind.
- The Manuel de Codage (acronym MdC) allows us to represent a hieroglyphic text so that it can be displayed and worked on using a computer.
- Do not hesitate to look at the various pages in the "Documentation" menu. You will get answers to many questions and, maybe, learn some new things ... for instance about the transliteration, the hieroglyphic fonts, the Multilingual Egyptology Thesaurus (MET), ...
- Everywhere in Rosette, an online help text is displayed when the mouse passes over. A click on any hieroglyph will open a pop-up window to reveal the Catalogue details of that particular glyph.
- At any time, and on most pages, do not hesitate to use the help function (the scribe palette icon at the top left of the page title).
- In particular, please read carefully the the instructions on this help to the home page. It is quite important that you activate Javascript and install the transliteration font. The other fonts (greek, hebrew, coptic) are of less significant.
