Digitizing Seth

Digital Approaches to Sethian Classification in the Coffin Texts

Abstract

To illustrate the benefits of digital research on hieroglyphs in Egyptology, this article presents the results of a case study into the use of the hieroglyphs of Seth and the Sethian animal as classifiers in the corpus of the Coffin Texts. This study covers two different approaches. One approach uses the research platform iClassifier to study the classifier strategies applied by the scribes of the Coffin Texts for lemmata that can take Sethian classification. Secondly, the animal depicted with the lemma sr (to foretell) in the Coffin Texts is discussed using a t-SNE layout based on image similarity.