Recent years saw a surge in the attention of scholarship to the rather neglected phenomenon of "determinatives" of the Egyptian script.

Discovered and defined already by Champollion, this extra-ordinary script phenomenon was hardly studied systematically in Egyptology (Goldwasser 2006a; Polis & Rosmorduc 2015).

Since 1995, a series of publications suggested a new theoretical approach to this phenomenon (e.g. Goldwasser 1995, 2002, 2005, 2006b; Lincke 2011, 2015; Kammerzell 1993, 1999, 2015; Grossman & Richter 2015: 81-86).

In this new research field, the determinatives are analyzed as an unpronounced classifier system, obeying defined rules and defined order, representing domains of the Egyptian culture - as conceived by the Ancient Egyptians (for classifiers in general as a representation of cognitive organization, e.g. Lakoff 1986). In 2012, a detailed framework for a linguistic and pragmatic definition of the Egyptian classifiers phenomenon concentrating among other issues on the definition of the ruled-based relations of the host word and its classifiers was offered by Lincke and Kammerzell (2012). In the same time, the linguist and classifiers expert Grinevald joined Goldwasser in forging a structured definition of the determinatives as classifiers, comparing the role they play in the Egyptian script to the role of pronounced classifiers in classifier languages around the world (Goldwasser & Grinevald 2012; Grinevald 2000, 2004; Senft 2000a, 2000b). Notwithstanding case studies, the theoretical analysis of the corpus of classifiers in Egyptian is still in its nascent stage (Polis and Rosmorduc 2015).
Theoretical diachronic evaluations of classifiers and classifiers combinations are still rather rare (Loprieno 2003; Spalinger 2008; Kammerzell 2015; Chantrain 2014). A corpus analysis of classifiers in religious texts was accomplished by Werning (2012: 323-326). However, the term “classifier” turns up more and more in
Egyptological resources in recent years, (e.g. Allon 2007; Quack 2010b: 239; Nyord 2015). Until now, no Egyptological database project (including the main Egyptological database- the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (TLA)), can be used for a computerized, large scale research endeavor on single classifiers or classifier combinations, as no accessible database in Egyptology has yet adopted a set approach to computer-
tagging of signs playing the role of classifiers in the texts.