From April 11–13, 2024, the Mainz Academy Project on Ancient Egyptian Cursive Scripts (AKU) organized the international conference Ägyptologische „Binsen“-Weisheiten V at the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. The conference, themed "Characteristics, Developments, and Interdependencies in the Hieroglyphic-Hieratic Writing System", gathered 50 colleagues on-site, with additional participants joining digitally. In total, attendees came from 17 different countries.
Between the varied presentations, there were also three open discussion sessions and a walk-around session.
The first two sections offered contributions on overarching themes, both temporally and contextually, while four sections featured chronologically oriented lectures on Old and Middle Kingdoms, the New Kingdom, the first millennium BC, and the Roman period. Additional presentations focused on scribal practices, rock inscriptions, graffiti and dipinti, as well as digital tools and methodological aspects.
The discussion sessions addressed issues related to the identification and transcription of hieratic and cursive hieroglyphic signs into so-called standard hieroglyphs (and transcription systems), the methods of palaeographic work and the description of signs and scripts, as well as documentation strategies for writing and writing materials.
In the walk-around session, participants could explore and exchange information about the Mainz online database AKU-PAL (https://aku-pal.uni-mainz.de) and the tool 'Isut' developed by Mark-Jan Nederhof (https://github.com/nederhof/isut) on two large screens.
The Book of Abstracts, which also includes the complete conference program, can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10847960.
The presentations will, as usual, be published shortly in the proceedings of the conference series Ägyptologische „Binsen“-Weisheiten.
We thank all participants for three very enriching days in the always collegial and communicative atmosphere of the Binsen community.