Abstract
Egyptology is becoming a strategic scientific discipline in that it is instructive for contemporary civilization and makes it possible to avoid critical mistakes in its development. However, classical Egyptology tools need to be supplemented by modern procedures that are more efficient in terms of the speed of the production of results and the processing of much more extensive data volumes, delivering more accurate and reliable evaluation of the findings.
Since the time of Plato, cybernetics has been providing methods by which models based on observations of the environment or sensor data are created to reflect the properties of systems and environments, and actions that change the environment are generated. Many of these practices, which include elements of learning and deduction techniques, are developed within the field of artificial intelligence.
Methods that specialize in analyzing relationships that can be modeled by graph theory are now widely developed within the framework of complex network analysis. To emphasize the increasing rate of application of these scientific methods to cover new challenges in processing ancient Egyptian data, the concept of cyber-Egyptology has been introduced recently.
Cyber-Egyptology deals with the interpretation of ancient Egyptian data and Egyptologists' observations using techniques based on the principles of cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and complex network analysis that might be modified to cope with a limited amount of complex structures containing uncertainties and missing entries. We offer an overview of a selected set of such methods and their application to Old Kingdom data.