Digitizing Seth: Digital studies of Sethian Hieroglyphs in the Coffin Texts

In order to illustrate the benefits digital research in Egyptology, this poster will present the results of a case study into the use of Seth and Sethian animals when used as a classifiers in the corpus of the Coffin Texts. This poster focuses on the occurrence rate of the classifier within the lemmas in which they occur, and additionally show the diatopic and diachronic tendency in occurrence or absence of Sethian classifiers. And other additional strategies in classification. The research is done using Grotenhuis project ‘Classifying the Middle Kingdom afterlife – a window into the Ancient Egyptian mind’, and the iClassifier digital research tool. On a second level, the poster will present the results of a study of the classifiers of the lemma sr ‘to foretell‘ in the cursive script of the Coffin Texts,. Its form in cursive scripts is often much more akin to a Sethian animal, rather than to the giraffe - commonly identified by scholars as the classifier. For this study, the forms of the animal hieroglyph will be collected and sorted digitally, to show the underlying issues with the interpretation, local traditions and scribal preferences in the cursive forms of the script.