• Corpus ID: 203906145

Logistics & Intelligence

@inproceedings{Maravelia2018LogisticsI,
  title={Logistics \& Intelligence},
  author={Alicia Maravelia},
  year={2018}
}

• Alicia Maravelia
• Published 2018
• Computer Science

Ancient Egyptian civilization is usually mentioned as a theocratic and particularly religious system o f society that managed to unite Upper and Lower Egypt since c. 3200 BC, presenting several artistic and cultural developments. N ot only the pyramids per se, but also the ancient Egyptian funerary texts offer m odem Egyptologists a glim pse o f the deep religious feeling and the use o f allegories and m e­ taphors as virtual vehicles for the expression o f significant philosophi­ cal and proto-scientific truths. The Logistics o f the ancient pyram idbuilders were particularly w ell organized and current research has shown that they had done everything with a remarkable precision, us­ ing simple machines and their ow n intelligent minds and their perfect­ ly organized hierarchical society. Their Mathematics and computatio­ nal methods, on the other hand, clearly prove that they were calcula­ ting using virtually the w ay m odem computers calculate, based on the binary system, although their Arithmetic w as rooted on a decimal nu­ merical system. This last is also attested by the fact that the fractions used by them were (almost 99%) only unitary, exactly as m odem com ­ puters are doing. In this paper w e shall endeavour to present and criti­ cally discuss the following: 1. A brief review and introduction to the in­ terdisciplinary domain o f informatization in Egyptology; 2. A n over­ v iew o f the ancient Egyptian mathematical and computational forma mentis. In the first instance w e shall present the principal develop­ ments o f the fruitful co-existence and collaboration o f Informatics and Egyptology for the last 50 years, putting emphasis on the outstanding work o f Emeritus Prof. Dr Dirk van der Plas (Holland) and his team [CCER, in the digitization o f important ancient Egyptian texts, like e. g.: the Coffin Texts, as w ell as in the evolution o f the best hierogly­ phic-editor software ever conceived (W inGlyph v . 2)]. In the second instance, w e shall briefly discuss the basics o f ancient Egyptian Mat­ hematics, their computational p reor even proto-scientific techniqu­ es and the simple operations, showing that the ancient Egyptian mind and culture w as indeed very advanced and from a certain point o f view , constituting the precursor for the developments o f m odem Science. K e y WORDS — (Smart) Informatics, Egyptology, Egyptological Digital Pro­ jects, Hieroglyphic Text Editors, W inGl y ph , JSe sh , Databases, Digitization of Ancient Texts, Informatics & Egyptology (LAE Working Group), Ancient Egyptian Mathematics, Computations, Operations, Arithmetical & Geometri­ cal Calculations, Binary & Decimal Numbers, (Unitary) Fractions, Pyramids, Eye of Homs. I. Smart Informatics & Egyptology. Digitization is one of the most interesting domains of modem Egyptology. As Dr S. Rosmorduc clearly states [Rosmorduc, 2015: 1-12], computer-assisted approaches to text and langua­ ge, referred to as Computational Linguistics, represent a deve­ loping field in Egyptology. One of the main concerns has been and continues to be the encoding of hieroglyphic signs for com­ puters. The historical standard in this respect is the Manuel de Codage [Buurman, van der Plas et al., 21986]; a Unicode encoding has also been recently developed. Computer assisted approaches also provide helpful tools notably for creating, an­ notating, and exploiting text databases [VAN DER PLAS, 1992: 38-43]. After pioneering work in the 1960s, a number of large text databases have been developed since the 1990s, for exam­ ple, the Thesaurus Linguæ Ægyptiæ or the Projet Ramsès. Ongoing projects involve automated text processing and ana­ lysis for Egyptian, especially automated transliteration, part-of -speech tagging, and optical character recognition. In this Sec­ tion, we shall briefly examine and highlight some of the princi­ pal achievements of the interdisciplinary interaction between (Smart) Informatics and Egyptology [van der Plas, 1984:217 -19; Vergnieux & Delevoie, 1996], 1.1. W inGlyph as the Smartest Editor for H ierogly­ phic Texts : The Glyph for Windows (hereafter WinGlyph) crowns the long tradition of hieroglyphic text processing asso­ ciated with the Utrecht University, Department of Religion [VAN DEN Bergh & Aubourg, 2000; VAN DER Plas, 2004]. The first (and up to now probably the best) program for printing hiero­ glyphic texts was created at the beginning of the ’70s by Jan Buurman for IBM mainframe computers with financial support from the Faculty of Theology. A study contract between the Dutch subsidiary of IBM and the Faculty of Theology in 1986 enabled Jan Buurman and Ed de Moel to produce a version of the program for the IBM-compatible Personal Computer. How­ ever, as soon as Microsoft Windows caused a revolution in the world of personal computers, the need was felt to develop a new hieroglyphic text processing package that would comply with modem demands. When the Centre for Computer-Aided Egyptological Research (CCER) was established in 1989 and obtained the rights to WinGlyph, creating a totally new pro­ gram running under Windows was made the first aim. Hans van den Berg was charged with the programming. WinGlyph is a specialized program for processing hieroglyphic texts on computer. On basis of encoded input, the program is able to pro­ duce high quality hieroglyphic output on the many types of prin­ ters supported by the Microsoft Windows’ Print Manager, as 978-1-5386-0821-0/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE