Mapping the Ancient Mind: iClassifier, a New Platform for Systematic Analysis of Classifiers in Egyptian and beyond

The research effort behind the creation of the iClassifier digital platform is the accurate description of the emic mental landscape of ancient Egypt, as reflected in the classifier system of the Egyptian script. Our central hypothesis is that each semantic classifier in the script system heads a conceptual category. Following this hypothesis, collecting as many lemmas, tokens, and their classifiers as possible will present us with an estimated, expanding map of the emic categories in the ancient Egyptian mind. Classifiers allow us to trace central members and marginal members, interrelations, and diachronic developments in each emerging category, taking into consideration classifier combinations, inverse correlations, and the lack of classifier use. Since classifiers are evident in the Egyptian script from its early stages, through Demotic, and up until the demise of Ptolemaic, the overall corpus should comprise millions of examples. The digital platform iClassifier is designed for large-scale data collection, analysis, and study of classifiers in complex scripts.