He Huang

A Study of Texts about the Sacred Mounds in Greco-Roman Egyptian Temples with Semantic Perspectives

This research aims to study texts describing the sacred mounds from the temple complexes of Dendera, Edfu, Philae, and Esna in the Greco-Roman period. Sacred mounds in different nomes (provinces) are burial places of local gods, who were usually equated with the deceased god Osiris and were periodically resurrected in their sacred mounds. Discussions about the functions and characters of the sacred mounds are vital for understanding Egyptians’ divine topography and belief in resurrection.
This study primarily takes semantic perspectives with a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze Egyptian texts related to the sacred mounds. A digital MySQL database for texts from well-defined research units is established to help seek patterns and preferences for certain words and phrases describing sacred mounds and explores how various kinds of contexts affect the choices of using descriptive words and phrases. Natural Language Processing techniques for generating word embeddings are applied to find clusters of semantic groups and semantic relationships between words. It is helpful to detect hidden semantic meanings and to reduce over-interpretation.