Everlasting Variations - Case Studies on the Hieroglyphic Repertoire in Synchrony and Diachrony - Proceedings of the International Conference, Liège, 11-13 June 2026

Formal variations are key for understanding the long-term evolution of the hieroglyphic system. Although often reduced to a convenient dating tool, more recent ‘grammatological’ and ‘graphetic’ studies have demonstrated that hieroglyphic paleography is essential for explaining both local peculiarities and long-term developments in monumental writing.
This conference seeks to gather studies on the formal aspects of the hieroglyphic repertoire from all periods of Egyptian history. Based on our work on the Thot Sign List, we are convinced that accumulating basic descriptions and analyses (Grundlagenforschung) concerning the specific shapes of hieroglyphic signs in certain contexts is crucial for enhancing our understanding of the hieroglyphic system and for getting closer to the emic conception of hieroglyphs by the Egyptian themselves.
We especially encourage the following two types of approaches:
a) Egyptologists often find that reading issues in particular inscriptions can ‘sharpen their eyes,’ drawing attention to unexpected formal details, which paves the way for exploring more general principles of sign variation. Processes of sign creation, composition, or alteration indeed often become significant only when contextualized within a specific text corpus defined by genre, spatial and temporal distribution, etc. Accordingly, studies about ‘abnormal’ hieroglyphic shapes are welcome, even if they defy proper interpretation for the time being.
b) Studying the diachronic development of individual hieroglyphic grapheme is a well-established genre of Egyptological research. ‘Sign biographies’ or ‘micro-histories’ of hieroglyphs can highlight general tendencies as well as key moments in the evolution of hieroglyphic writing system. Formally similar signs may assimilate (or dissimilate) over long periods of time. Moreover, the appearance, modification, disappearance, or reappearance of hieroglyphic signs may not necessarily be driven by linguistic factors alone; they can also originate from changes in material culture and conventions regarding its artistic representation. Investigations of such diachronic aspects constitute the second focus of the conference.
Those formal dimensions of the monumental norm are obviously connected to the evolution of the cursive scripts and to the functional realm (i.e., which graphemic functions and linguistic meaning are associated with individual signs). However, recent conferences and papers have already addressed these topics, so they should not be the primary focus of submissions for Everlasting variations.