Last updated February 8, 2023 at 11:23 AM
Discover Fabricius, an application that makes you discover Egypt differently.
Google has developed a tool for enthusiasts of ancient Egypt. This is the Fabricius web tool, an application for deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Since the launch of google arts and culture, thecompany has never stopped innovating in the digital field to bring the public to take an interest in art and culture.
Recently Google launched the first tool allowing Egyptologists to understand hieroglyphics effortlessly.
Indeed, the traditional method required researchers to use many reference books to do the translation. According to google: ” experts had to manually search books and books to translate and decipher the ancient language. "
In this post, we will present the Fabricius application, which allows experts and amateurs to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Fabricius – an application for deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs
Today with this tool named Fabricius, in honor of the “father of epigraphy, Science ancient inscriptions”, we can use machine learning to understand the ancient scriptures of Egypt. The video below shows how the app works.
You can access the tool via artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/fabricius
What exactly is Fabricius doing?
The tool, when you go to your website has 3 important sections. The first is to teach you via an introduction to the deciphering of hieroglyphics, the writing of ancient Egypt.
The second section is a tiny cat which changes your text to hieroglyphs and vice versa. You can share the result with your friends in social networks. It should be noted that the translation is not very rigorous. Not all texts are encryptable.
At the time of writing this article, only texts in English are taken into account. Some words also have no meaning in hieroglyphs like world et test. So we have to take this feature lightly, it's only there to have fun and impress our friends.
We go to the 3rd and last section which is even the most important. This is a software that we must install in our own pc for professional use of the hieroglyphics deciphering tool.
Professional use of Fabricius
Fabricius desktop software is for researchers. This tool will allow its users to decode symbols.
To do so, they will have to send an image of the hieroglyph manually and wait for the application to decode the ancient Egyptian inscriptions using machine learning.
This tool is also opensource and available for free in Github (https://github.com/googleartsculture/workbench).
Last updated February 8, 2023 at 11:23 AM
Conclusion
In this post, we saw a web application allowing anyone to be interested in the science of deciphering Egyptian hyeroglyphs. We also saw how Fabricius, the tool designed for this purpose works and how to use it to impress our friends.
It should also be remembered that there is an expert version of Fabricius, which can be installed on the desktop, which allows decryption experts to save time in their activity. You can find the application on the website artsexperiments.withgoogle.com.
