Documentary evidence from Egypt after the Arab conquest on papyrus and paper has been preserved in numerous collections worldwide. Individual documents such as contracts, letters, and receipts contain valuable information about practically every aspect of everyday life. The multitude of collections and the documents’ acquisition history result in now scattered, formerly contiguous corpora, which seemingly show a bulk of single, disconnected pieces of writing.
However, we believe that all documents are connected to each other in certain ways –
the basic idea behind EGIPTOS.
EGIPTOS (Establishing Groups, Identifying Patterns in Texts from Original Sources) is in the preparatory stage for a large-scale papyrological project which combines Arabic documents (on parchment, papyrus, and paper) with documents in Greek, Coptic, Hebrew and other languages, whose production overlaps with the time frame for early and classical Islamic Egypt.
Through a comparison of selected key features, groups and clusters of documents can be combined into corpora and sub-corpora. The webportal as working tool of the project aims not only at an intuitive and simple way to select documents based on specific characteristics, but also at displaying their relational proximity to other documents. Published and unpublished material can be grouped according to various criteria and tags, which will provide an easily accessible research basis for experienced Arabic papyrologists and PhD and graduate students alike, as well as for scholars of related studies interested in aspects of medieval Egypt.
EGIPTOS is based on MySQL, using WordPress as Content Management System (CMS) and Javascript and PHP as programming languages. It is located at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU) and associated to the research group “Arabic Papyrology” (https://www.naher-osten.uni-muenchen.de/forschung/egiptos/index.html).
The current team consists of:
PhD Ursula Hammed (PI):
https://lmu-munich.academia.edu/UrsulaBsees
https://www.naher-osten.uni-muenchen.de/personen/wiss_ma/ursula_bsees/index.html
MA Michail Hradek (papyrological research, examination of original texts, data processing):
https://www.naher-osten.uni-muenchen.de/personen/wiss_ma/hradek_michail/index.html
MSc Florian Zacherl (IT consultant, designer of the webportal):
https://www.naher-osten.uni-muenchen.de/personen/wiss_ma/florian_zacherl/index.html