Over 2,000 new Hieroglyphs may soon be available for use on cell phones, computers, and other digital devices. The Unicode Consortium recently released a revised draft of standards for encoding Egyptian Hieroglyphs. If approved, the available Hieroglyphs will provide greater access and global uniformity for Egyptologists, covering a much longer period of Hieroglyphic usage than ever before. The proposal is part of a larger effort between the Unicode Consortium, ancient linguists, font designers, and the federal government to attempt to study, preserve, and then digitally represent ancient and endangered languages through the use of computer code.
Between 750 and 1,000 Hieroglyphs were used by Egyptian authors during the periods of the Old, Middle, and then New Kingdom (2687 BCE–1081 BCE). That number later greatly increased during the Greco-Roman period, likely to around 7,000. It was during this later time that Egypt was occupied and ruled by Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies (which included Cleopatra), and then the Roman Empire (332 BCE–641 CE). The language grew, changed, and diversified over the course of thousands of years, a fact which can now be reflected through its digital encoding. Although Egyptian Hieroglyphs have been defined within Unicode since version 5.2, released in 2009, the glyphs were highly limited in number and did not stretch into the Greco-Roman period. There was also no agreed upon method for placing hieroglyphs into groups.
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