Shoulder Egyptology

I consider myself not only a linguist, but even a cunning linguist. Hence, I was immediately interested in trying Google’s new translation tool for ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Fabricius. How cool is that, being able to translate, on your laptop, what some ancient priest/scribe wrote down more than 2000 years ago. However, I don’t live in Egypt where I can just find myself a temple and photograph the writings on the wall, but I reside on an island in the Philippines. What hieroglyphs can I hence try to translate? Those on my shoulder!

As a neuroscience grad student I got this tattoo of the hieroglyphs for “brain”, as I saw them in Kandel’s textbook on neuroscience. Very convenient, even with a bad hangover I could look up on my right shoulder what I am supposed to research. Now, many years later the tattoo is still there (that’s what tattoos do) and I now want to try Farbricius with this ancient Egyptian word. How did it go?

First, pretty straightforwardly, I had my lovely spouse take a picture of my shoulder (plus semi-impressive triceps). I loaded that into Fabricius:

Secondly, I had to set a detection threshold so that the actual hieroglyphs stood out:

After a little bit of extra pre-processing I arrived at a black-and white picture with the four hieroglyphs on my shoulder, and the actual translation could start. Unless I missed something, that was not automatic, but I had to chose which hieroglyph on my shoulder corresponds to which hieroglyph in the dictionary. The dictionary was organized along categories, such as mammals, birds, work, deities, … It took a bit to find the fitting hieroglyphs, and I think I got the proper ones, I am not 100% certain. The middle 2 characters seem mirror symmetric to the ones on my tattoo, but I couldn’t find a better fit. Suggestions?

After finding the symbols for all 4 hieroglyphs on my shoulder, I tried to get a translation; This did not yield “brain”. I got some information, but not the complete word. There is an option to add a translation, but I do not consider myself a competent enough Egyptologist at all to do that. I have been to Egypt twice, to scuba dive, but in fact I do not at all consider myself an Egyptologist!

Conclusion

Very very cool, in principle, thank you Googles. But, the tool is far from a plug & play solution for hieroglyph translation, and it seems to be missing known translations, such as the word “brain” on my shoulder, and/or it’s not trivial to match the correct hieroglyphs from your picture to the ones in the dictionary.