Digitization of ancient texts

There is a nice piece in the May 8th WSJ that offers a good summary of the major digital projects in Papyrology. The story also provide some goods links to some of the major ongoing efforts. Among them is the very exciting multi-spectral imaging project taking place this summer in the papyrus collections of Michigan, Berkeley and Columbia. Spectacular results, and new texts, and new information, are sure to be announced.

Among the more important projects are those being run out of the Center for the Study of Ancient Documents (CSAD) in Oxford. They’ve recently placed on line a digital collection of Greek papyri in Cairo. Underlying the project is the pioneering photographic work of Adam Bülow-Jacobsen in Copenhagen. Superb and wonderful work!

Exciting new multi-year international project on political power and bureaucracy

Scholars in Vienna are creating a multi-year international, cooperative project on political power and ancient bureaucracy focused on Papyrology and later periods of ancient Egyptian history (i..e post-Ptolemaic). It’s called the Comparative Studies in Ancient Bureaucracy and Officialdom project and is part of the Austrian National Research Network (NRN).

Sub-projects and their directors are:

Coordination Project (M. Jursa)
01…Royal Institutional Households in 1st Millennium BC Mesopotamia (H. Baker)
02…Official Epistolography in Babylonia in the 1st Millennium BC (M. Jursa)
03…The Framework of Imperial Power in Late Antique Egypt (284-641 AD) (B. Palme)
04…Official Epistolography in Islamic Egypt (642-969 AD) (S. Proházka)
05…The Interaction of Roman Rule with Traditional Hellenistic Institutions in Asia Minor (H. Taeuber)
06…Police Authorities in Late Antique Egypt (S. Tost)

You can read more about it on their website, which is just being filled up now. Looks like  a really interesting project.  The home of the project, Vienna, is not too far from some mountains. Mmmmmm. More about the project as it develops.

A demotic marriage contract, 97 BC, (Gebelein) Upper Egypt

The following is a legal document written at the beginning of the first century BC, from a military community established in the southern Egyptian Nile valley in the Ptolemaic period. It is the kind of primary documentary material that I am looking at with some of my students this term. We are examining such material from several Mediterranean cultures formthe point of view of how such texts functioned within society as well as some of the technical points of ancient legal documents.   Notice the upper and lower margins here, to protect the preservation of the writing, the scribe would leave wide margins on all four sides typically, so when the text was rolled up and sealed, wear and tear would not effect the contents. Can you spot the beginning of the text? The text is now part of the Schoyen collection (the Adler papyri).