The linguistic abilities of scribes writing in Egyptien de Tradition has been severely contested. The underlying assumptions on the evolutionary process of languages are highly questionable. In this project, quantitative and novel non-quantitative approaches will be developed to assess scribal activities in the 1st millenium BCE. Our approach aims to achieve a meaningful clustering of the different texts belonging to Egyptien de Tradition. The results will be evaluated according to the historical context of creation of the texts. We begin by using classical methods such as correspondence analysis to pinpoint the differences in grammatical aspects of different texts. This method results in the clustering of the texts according their grammatical construct. We will then explore other clustering methods belonging to the general family of spectral clustering. We will also develop a novel clustering approach based the idea that the operations of a Boolean Ring are highly suitable for text analysis. For example, the clustering of two texts A and B into two sets representing their commonalities and their differences is equivalent to computing the product and the addition of A and B in some suitable Boolean Ring.
More information can be found on the Math+ Website of the project: