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E-Papyri: Egypt's Legacy Online
From: Columbia University
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 apyri reveal to scholars the lives of people in ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt through literature and records of daily transactions--from contracts and legal documents to private letters. Kept in the musty, cool, dry depths of university libraries and museums, they are normally seen only by a handful of specialized scholars. |
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But a consortium of dust-free scholars from six American universities, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, is bringing Egyptian papyri online for unrestricted access. Collectively called APIS (Advanced Papyrological Information System), the consortium is combining their efforts to preserve, document and scan hundreds of thousands of published and unpublished ancient documents for viewing and searching on the Web. |
Under the leadership of Columbia University classics professor and papyrologist Roger Bagnall, APIS (www.columbia.edu/dlc/apis/) will serve as a central repository for catalog information, physical descriptions, translations and manipulable scanned images of papyri from member institutions' collections. These institutions currently include Columbia University, Duke University, Princeton University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Michigan and Yale University. All of this information is organized in a searchable database, with documents cross-referenced by keywords, names and subjects. |
Funding for APIS has allowed member institutions to bring their catalogs and preservation techniques up to date, and the need for searchable databases has allowed APIS to set standards for these tasks. "The standards for preservation have evolved enormously," says Don Skemer, curator of manuscripts and manager of the project at Princeton. "In fact, the standards were hardly developed when these collections were taken out of Egypt." Several thousand papyri were cataloged in the first several decades of the twentieth century, when papyrus excavation was at a peak, and many have remained untouched since then. By pioneering the digital scanning of these ancient documents, APIS has also set standards for imaging papyri. |
The first priority for APIS papyrologists was documenting and scanning texts that have been studied and published by scholars, and entering this information into a database; the databases are now being fleshed out with descriptions and images of unpublished papyri. "Nobody outside the APIS partners has put information about unpublished texts up (on the Web)," says Bagnall. With thousands of texts "still lying around," says John Oates, professor of classics and head of the Duke University effort, "there is a vast employment for generations of scholars." |
"The vision I have, and the one I've had from the start," says Oates, "is accessibility and getting these documents into the mainstream of the study of history." Duke has concentrated its efforts on expanding the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri (DDBDP), the searchable archive of papyri that is the core of APIS's database, with information from other APIS members. "The Data Bank is the essential research tool in papyrology, the core around which APIS will revolve," says Oates. |
Duke's Data Bank contains records for more than 50,000 Greek and Latin texts that have been published by scholars, but Oates estimates there are another 250,000 unpublished texts--in Greek and Latin as well as in demotic, Coptic, Arabic and other languages--yet to be entered. DDBDP is managed by the database wizards at the Perseus Project (www.perseus.tufts.edu/) an online library at Tufts University for scholars of the ancient world, with access to thousands of Greek and Roman records. |
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The use of papyri has gone up as a result of these specific descriptions," says Princeton's Skemer. "People now find it easier to know there are descriptions of 900 texts [at Princeton], not just the 130 published." Professors are also starting to use images of papyri as teaching aides in the classroom. Bagnall adds that directly scanned papyrus images have added advantages over the traditional black-and-white photographs that have been used by papyrologists for decades. "Scanned images do not have as fine a contrast as silver halide images, but because they're manipulable they're much more useful," he says. "The ability to play with them and change the size and contrast makes them far more useful than traditional photos." |
One of the aims of APIS is to make papyri available to academics outside the field of papyrology. Classicists, historians and social scientists should be able to readily find information of interest by searching in APIS. For example, a women's studies scholar will be able to search with keywords and dates for documents, such as legal records and letters, that are relevant to women's rights in the third century. Skemer warns, "It is a daunting task to deal with papyrology--most documents are not complete and you need to know the context of things," but APIS members are hopeful that the accessibility of the papyri will encourage wary scholars to approach these documents. |
A major advantage to centralizing papyrological information, aside from the ability to search a single database, will be in reconstructing a history that has been fragmented by excavation and collection. "A lot of these things came from the same place and context but were distributed and broken up," Skemer says. "Electronically, we are able to put this all together again. The isolated documents have additional meaning because, through APIS, we've integrated this collection over six institutions." |
In future stages of APIS's expansion, non-member institutions worldwide will be invited to enter their collections into the database. APIS will provide templates and data formats to standardize the new information and will manage the integration of the new data, and it will also face the challenge of keeping its databases current with rapidly changing technology. "It is a great problem for humanists," says Oates, "a source of great despair--at least for this humanist. You learn something and then you have to move on again." |
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