(English version below)

In Trauer und Dankbarkeit geben die Mitarbeitenden des Vorhabens Strukturen und Transformationen des Wortschatzes der ägyptischen Sprache den Tod von Professor Wolfgang Schenkel bekannt, der zu den bedeutendsten Linguisten der ägyptischen Sprache und den Pionieren der computergestützten Philologie und Sprachwissenschaft gehört und der von 1994 bis 2003 als Projektleiter des Vorgänger-Vorhabens „Altägyptisches Wörterbuch“ gewirkt hat.

In Memoriam Wolfgang Schenkel (1936–2026)

It is with sadness and gratitude that the staff of the project Strukturen und Transformationen des Wortschatzes der ägyptischen Sprache announce the passing of Professor Wolfgang Schenkel, one of the most prominent linguists of the Egyptian language and a pioneer of computer-assisted philology and linguistics, who served as project director of the predecessor project “Altägyptisches Wörterbuch.”

Wolfgang Schenkel was born on October 16, 1936, in Ludwigshafen-Oggersheim. After graduating from the classical languages program at the Gymnasium in Ludwigshafen, he began his studies in 1956 at Heidelberg University, focusing on Egyptology, Ancient Near Eastern and Semitic Philology, Classical Archaeology, and General Linguistics. In 1958, he continued his studies in Bonn, where he earned his doctorate in 1961 under Elmar Edel, following a year of study abroad in Paris. Wolfgang Schenkel’s dissertation Frühmittelägyptische Studien, published in 1962, already reveals him in all his mastery as a philologist and as a subtle observer and sharp analyst of linguistic variants in Egyptian texts at the boundary between different linguistic standards—texts to which his second book,  Memphis, Herakleopolis, Theben: Die epigraphischen Zeugnisse der 7.–11. Dynastie Ägyptens (Ägyptologische Abhandlungen 12, Wiesbaden 1965), was also dedicated. A travel grant from the German Archaeological Institute enabled Wolfgang Schenkel in 1964–65 to undertake a grand tour of classical antiquity from Greece through Turkey to Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia. He then left the university for seven years, from 1965 to 1972, to work as a project manager at the German Research Center for Information Technology in Darmstadt, a leading institution of its kind in Europe at the time. These years would prove to be formative for the Egyptologist Wolfgang Schenkel, who went on to become one of the “Prometheans” who brought the fire of information technology to the methodological repertoire of Egyptology, rooted in the 19th century. Schenkel implemented this methodological transfer in his own research by developing a system in 1967 for the mechanical analysis of an ancient Egyptian texts (M.A.A.T.) and in his work, begun in the 1970s, on a computer-based concordance of the Egyptian Coffin Texts. After Wolfgang Schenkel had received his habilitation in Göttingen in 1974 with a study of a fundamental problem in the historical linguistics of Egyptian—the origin of ancient Egyptian suffixal conjugation—he was appointed to the chair of Egyptology at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen in 1978, where he taught and conducted research until his retirement in 2002.

Following the political transition in Germany, Jan Assmann stepped in on behalf of the Conference of Academies as interim coordinator of the Berlin working group at the former Central Institute for Ancient History and Archaeology and, as chairman of the expert committee, paved the way for the continuation of Egyptological research at the newly founded Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW). The final, decisive step toward consolidation took place in 1994, when the transfer of project leadership to Wolfgang Schenkel—who, given his professional stature, was predestined for the role like no other—set the course for the project’s enduring success.
The Schenkel era was fundamental to the early and complete digitization of the project’s work and to the decisive focus on building a lemmatized and morphologically annotated full-text corpus of Egyptian as the primary goal. Based on Wolfgang Schenkel’s idea to digitize and index the 1.5 million slip archive cards of the old Berlin dictionary project, plans for an online presence for the project were conceived in 1995/6 and realized in 1999, even before the release of the first online version of the digital full-text corpus Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae in 2004.

After handing over the leadership of the project to Stephan Seidlmayer in 2003, Wolfgang Schenkel continued to support the work on the full-text corpus of the Egyptian language until 2007 as chairman of both scientific advisory boards for the project at the BBAW and at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig (SAW), of which he had been a Corresponding Member since 1999. He has remained closely associated with the project ever since. To celebrate his 80th birthday in 2016, the project, together with the universities in Berlin, organized the international symposium Die klassisch-ägyptische Sprache im Schnittpunkt von Philologie und Linguistik (The Classical Egyptian Language at the Intersection of Philology and Linguistics).
In recent years, intensive work has been carried out to integrate the digital data of the Egyptian Coffin Texts compiled by Wolfgang Schenkel into the project’s text database. Its upcoming publication in the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae will go down in the annals of the project as the largest single addition of text volume.

Wolfgang Schenkel worked until shortly before his death. He passed away in his 90th year, the completion of which we had hoped to celebrate with him on October 16, 2026, but will now commemorate in his memory.

Berlin, March 2026