Digitising Ancient Egyptian Texts
Ancient Egyptian texts discarded more than 2000 years ago such as mundane documents, letters & contracts were recycled and used to plaster over mummies. Now the Stanford University is analysing these papyri to give insight into what life was like in Ptolemaic times.
“”I’m the one in charge of making sense of this,” said John Sutherland, a Stanford graduate student puzzling over a text written in Greek, which was Egypt’s official language during the Ptolemaic Era. He could make out a few names and realize the document was some type of list.
“That’s about all I have now,” he said. But he expects additional analysis will tell him more about Egypt’s Fayoum region, where most of these texts were written. “We have such a lack of documentation about common people from this time period that you have to use every source you can get.”
Sutherland is one of 18 students from 15 universities around the world working this month at Stanford to interpret some of the university’s papyri and publish their findings. The group makes up the participants in this year’s Papyrological Institute, an annual summer gathering of students and experts sponsored by the American Society of Papyrologists.
The students meet each day at Green Library, where the texts are held. Members of the library staff have played a key role in the preservation efforts, helping mount and digitize the texts.
About $100,000 for this year’s Papyrological Institute comes from Stanford’s Department of Classics, the Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, the Social Science History Institute and the offices of the President and the Provost.
Working with modern technology to make sense of the ancient texts, the students use laptops to tap into databases of papyrological information maintained by Duke and Columbia universities. After the students enter individual words or phrases gleaned from the texts in front of them, the databases help determine whether the pieces in Stanford’s collection are related to any previously published texts. “
Read the full story at the Stanford University’s News Service
Tags: language
