artThe drawn signs

They are drawn for this project. The file that holds them says so in its own header: the glyphs are drawn from published descriptions of the signs, not traced from any one object, and they go out under the project's own licence, which is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

Inference — that sentence carries the whole argument. A photograph of a wedjat eye is a photograph of one wedjat eye, from one dynasty, in one material, in one museum's lighting. The sign is the class. When the atlas needs to say "this amulet carries the eye", a drawing of the class says it and a photograph of a specimen quietly says something narrower and slightly wrong. So the photographs go on the amulet records, where a specific object is the point, and the drawings go on the sign records, where it is not.

There is a second reason and it is not aesthetic. An SVG that is text in the page is an SVG a reader can select, a screen reader can walk and a slow connection still gets — the same file states that too. A drawn sign costs a few hundred bytes. A photograph costs a hundred times that and still needs a licence, an author, a page URL and a hash beside it.

One of the twenty-six is the swastika, and the atlas draws it for the same reason it draws the others: it is one of the oldest and most widespread signs in this material, and a global index of signs that skipped it would be lying by omission. The record that explains what the drawing does and does not mean is /story/the-swastika-problem, and the glyph links to it.

Reusable. Under CC BY 4.0 anyone may copy, modify and republish them, commercially included, with credit to this project. The same file also draws the world maps — Equal Earth, from Natural Earth outlines — and the timeline axis, so the signs and the maps share one visual grammar and one colour set, built around the blue-green of faience.