On the anniversary of the discovery of Rosetta Stone – the tool that first gave us access to hieroglyphics, the language of Ancient Egypt – Google is revolutionizing the way we study ancient languages. In a new development for the search giant’s Arts and Culture vertical, learning to decipher hieroglyphics will be easier than ever before.
Pulling out all the stops, Google recruited Eygyptologists from around the world along with Australian Center for Egyptology at Macquarie University, Psycle Interactive, and Ubisoft to put an end to the tedious practice of flipping pages and create a tool that will allow everyone to discover the languages of the past: Fabricius.
Fabricius lets users to ‘Learn’ about the ancient language and culture and ‘Play’ around with what you’ve learned, translating your own sentences into hieroglyphs and sharing with your family and friends.
Though the ‘Play’ feature isn’t academically accurate, Fabricius will be a great asset to academic research in this area. In a statement, Google said, “So far, experts had to dig manually through books upon books to translate and decipher the ancient language–a process that has remained virtually unchanged for over a century. Fabricius includes the first digital tool – that is also being released as open source to support further developments in the study of ancient languages – that decodes Egyptian hieroglyphs built on machine learning”.
Not only will the tool be expanding to include more of the world’s ancient languages, it’s completely free! A whole world of hidden messages at your fingertips? What a steal.
