New method for correct identification of structural elements of ancient hieroglyphs

Full Text

1. Introduction Writing on bronze vessels (Jinwen) and tortoise shells and fortunetelling bones Jiaguwen relate to the oldest examples of art and culture [1-10]. They are unique in their own way. Jiaguwen (甲骨文 / Jiǎgǔwén, XIV-XI c. BC) are hieroglyphic inscriptions fixing the results of fortune telling or predictions [3, 6-9]. Bronze vessels Jinwen ( jīnwén / 金文, the earliest of which date back to the end of 2nd millennium BC) belong also to the most ancient samples of Chinese history, linguistics, archeology, and science [4, 7, 8]. These ancient objects are often poorly preserved, but these objects are of great historical, cultural and scientific value [11]. Basically, their research is devoted to the study of hieroglyphic inscriptions written in the surface in order to interpret their contents, as well as the identification of ancient keys (hieroglyphs) or Chinese radicals (bùshǒu / 部首). Figure 1. An example of Jiaguwen (甲骨文, “Turtle shell inscriptions”)-hieroglyphic inscriptions fixing the results of fortune telling or predictions. Vertical lines in the center: “1” corresponds to the central part of the investigated surface of the shell, where there are no hieroglyphs; “2” corresponds to the investigated part of the surface of the shell, where there is a column of ancient Chinese hieroglyphs The present paper is devoted to the development of a new method for solving some problem for recognition of ancient artifacts [7, 12]. Using digital photometric data of the artifact relief, this method allows determining various characteristics and parameters, including statistical ones, characterizing the properties of the studied ancient surface, e.g. Jiǎgǔwén, jīnwén [7, 11-20]. The main task of the work is to reveal the possibility of correct identification of groove-type elements that are an integral part of various structural surface elements. In technical applications, these elements can be various single grooves, which are the constituent elements of such widely used structures as diffraction gratings and grating’s type structures. In the study of the oldest artifacts, for example, Jiaguwen or Jinwen, there is a need to study ancient hieroglyphs written on the surface of a tortoise shell, copper vessel or stone [3, 4, 6-9]. 2. Materials and methods This article uses a new statistical method of research, which can be a good addition to the currently used traditional methods (mainly visual) of research [8, 9, 11-18]. This method allows using various digital photometric data on the surface of the shell (see Figure 1) to determine various characteristics and parameters characterizing different properties (including statistical) of the investigated surface [8, 12]. The main advantages of our research method are: contactless, informativeness, non-destructivity, and potentially high enough resolution (for example, according to the statistical parameters of the surface profile). This allows us to talk about its promise in the study of such ancient art and culture as Jiaguwen. The main goal at this stage of the study is to demonstrate the possibility of a certain identification of ancient hieroglyphs written on the surface of the tortoise shell using the obtained digital surface profiles of the test sample. Egorova, M. A., Egorov, A. A., New method for correct identification of structural elements of … 327 It is important to emphasize that the results obtained allowed us to solve the formulated problem of identifying the studied surface images, namely, to determine approximately the number of ancient Chinese radicals placed on the scan line of the surface profile with hieroglyphs. It is shown that the discrepancy with predetermined number of hieroglyphs does not exceed 10%. At this stage of the study, the results obtained can be considered good. Our method is based on photometry of artifact surface profiles, in which a sample of brightness levels in a discrete set of points is carried out with subsequent conversion to digital form [7, 11, 12]. Photometric data of the surface profile can be obtained using for example “Fiji ImageJ” program for Windows [7, 11-16]. The obtained data are digitally processed in order to determine the characteristics and parameters characterizing the properties of the researched artifact (see Appendix) [7, 11, 12]. We utilize different research methods including a statistical approach, which allows us to find the characteristics and profile parameters of the test sample according to photometry of its surface [7]. This research method will finally solve an important inverse problem of pattern recognition: find the number of characters in the studied sections of the surface profile, as well as identify a solitary micro-object of the groove type. Properties of these structures will be useful in further research of different type ancient hieroglyphs, for example Chinese hieroglyphs (see Appendix). The use of digital methods for processing large amounts of experimental data, for example, using such well-known signal processing methods as the fast Fourier transforms or wavelet transform, undoubtedly allows us to obtain new interesting results [7, 12]. However, we should note that these studies are quite expensive and time-consuming. Figure 1 shows a processed photo of a shell, which is one of the objects under study. The images used in this paper are taken from open sources and are used as illustrations [4, 6, 7, 9, 11]. The subject of the study is the ancient shell with or without hieroglyphs written on it surface by the antique scribe. Major attention is paid to the improvement of innovative methods for the correct identification of the same type of hieroglyphic signs in the ancient hieroglyphic inscriptions according to the typical digitized data. The solution of this key problem makes it possible to avoid mistakes at the initial stage of the study. As a result, at all subsequent stages of research it becomes possible to examine the accurate data. Finally, when the correct recognition of hieroglyphic signs is carried out, one can obtain the quantity of ancient hieroglyphs. 3. Results Our main goal is to find the quantity of ancient Chinese hieroglyphs (radicals / bùshǒu / 部首) ℑ. For this purpose we propose several procedures (see Appendix) [7, 12, 14, 15]: 1) as an initial estimate - an integral method that permits to define the number of grooves (structural elements of hieroglyphic inscriptions) on the scanning line; 2) division the scan interval length

About the authors

Maia A. Egorova

RUDN University

Email: Mey1@list.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2931-8330

Candidate of Political Sciences, Associate Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

6 Miklukho-Maklaya St, Moscow, 117198, Russian Federation

Alexander A. Egorov

RUDN University

Author for correspondence.
Email: alexandr_egorov@mail.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-1999-3810

Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Consulting Professor

6 Miklukho-Maklaya St, Moscow, 117198, Russian Federation

References