Audience:

The UEE will be of primary use for research and teaching of professional Egyptologists; historians of art, architecture, religion, science and medicine; archaeologists; anthropologists; students of Egyptology and related disciplines; and for the large group of interested members of the general public who read at an academic level. Each entry has an opening screen with a brief fact file description of the subject, in language that avoids jargon, giving quick access to the basic factual information. These brief descriptions will be published in English and Arabic. The latter is considered of great importance, because it will enable the Egyptian public access to an internationally established body of information on the Egyptian cultural heritage, reflecting at the same time respect for the present day Egyptian culture. The main part of the entry is written for a scholarly, but not necessarily specialized, public. The use of technical language will, therefore, be avoided wherever possible.

Size:

The final size of the Encyclopedia of Egyptology is currently determined at 4000 text entries, of various length, but with an overall average length of 1500 words, encompassing a total number of 6,000,000 words. This size is based on a comparison with the Lexikon der Ägyptologie (LÄ), to date the standard reference work for Egyptology. The LÄ consists of seven volumes, of which the last one contains essentially the indexes. The other six volumes, which contain the text entries, comprise approximately 3000 entries and 4,200,000 words. Analyzing the admirable Lexikon der Ägyptologie brings to light that the editors' definition of 'Egyptology' barely covered the Greco-Roman period, while the archaeology of Egypt, the history of study, methodology, theory and the legacy of ancient Egypt in the modern world are represented by relatively few entries. The editors of the UEE consider these areas to be of great importance and must therefore allow for a large number of additional entries, as well as many considerably longer entries, to achieve a comprehensive level of coverage.

Apart from the 4000 textual entries, other objects, such as spatial models, maps, reconstructions and illustrations which have their own metadata, will be considered a separate, albeit fully integrated, corpus of entries. In implementation phase one the editors and the Academic Editorial Committee will decide how extensive this part of the UEE will be.

Content:

For each entry the Academic Editorial Committee will assign a specialized author, based on expertise in the subject matter. Authors whose contributions involve their own fieldwork will be asked to provide good quality images and give permission to the UEE to include these materials in the publication. The images will be water marked and a provision will be made that the images can only be used for non-commercial purposes.

The first implementation phase concentrates on the text entries. In the second and third implementation phases the UEE will continue building an image database and negotiate the conditions under which different museum collections are willing to make images of their collections available. This will be an important part of the UEE, as it will not only provide images as illustrations with the textual entries, but also a repository for data on the material culture of ancient Egypt . A central image database will be one step towards a virtual reunification of the material cultural heritage that is dispersed over museums in many different countries.

Text entries are generated through a hierarchical grouping of facets that forms the conceptual back bone of the UEE. The development of this taxonomy is in progress as part of the pilot phase. In general authors are asked to pay explicit attention (where relevant) to social aspects such as gender, age, status and ethnicity; the earliest and latest occurrence of the object / phenomenon etc.; material and technology; function and meaning; origin, developments and sources of modern knowledge.

Interactive maps will be generated whenever relevant for the entry, based on the geographical position system coordinates (GPS). The metadata of the entries are part of the geographical information systems (GIS), so that search results can be presented as geographical data and spatial relations, rather than just text. A shortcut from the maps to the textual or pictorial information is provided through clickable maps which pull up the metadata and the original entry. For each major period of Egyptian history key ancient sites, and some modern cities, will be incorporated automatically to provide a reference point. The maps can be used to zoom in to a specific area, with gradually increasing detail, based on the present landscape and linked to information about the ancient sites.

UEE Data Access Level:

Integrated in the UEE is the Data Access Level (UEE-DAL) a repository and access medium that brings original data from excavations on-line. Ongoing excavations are stimulated to upload their data, which will be stored for perpetuity. The information can be kept for limited access for the period until the data have been published, but will ultimately be accessible to the Egyptological community and the public at large.