Corpus of Greek papyrus texts with administrative content from Ptolemaic Egypt

The project aims to collect around 6,500 Greek papyrus sources of administrative content from Hellenistic Egypt and to analyze them from various specialist perspectives. The historical and philological value of this documentation is unique: as used texts, papyrological documents provide an unadulterated insight into the multifaceted administrative and legal organization of an ancient society in its entirety. The aim of the project is to use this rich documentation to examine the question of how manorial administration was organized in an ancient multicultural community. The project aims to record the entirety of the administrative institutions and the processes they controlled in Ptolemaic Egypt for the first time on the basis of Greek papyrus documents.

ancient papyrus site
ancient papyrus site

Link

tba

Runtime

2024-2036

project participants

Project management: Prof. Dr. Charikleia Armoni (Papyrology, University of Cologne), Prof. Dr. Jürgen Hammerstaedt (Papyrology, University of Cologne), Prof. Dr. Stefan Pfeiffer (Classical Studies, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg). CCeH employees: Marcel Schaeben, Moritz Esser.

Funding

Funded by the German Research Foundation.

Description

The long-term project, a cooperation between the Cologne Institute of Classical Studies (Papyrology) and the Department of Classical Studies (Ancient History) at the University of Halle, is funded by the German Research Foundation. The project aims to collect around 6,500 Greek papyrus sources of administrative content from Hellenistic Egypt and to analyze them from various specialist perspectives. The historical and philological value of this documentation is unique: as used texts, papyrological documents provide an unadulterated insight into the multifaceted administrative and legal organization of an ancient society in its entirety. The aim of the project is to use this rich documentation to examine the question of how manorial administration was organized in an ancient multicultural community. The project aims to record the entirety of the administrative institutions and the processes they controlled in Ptolemaic Egypt for the first time on the basis of Greek papyrus documents. The sources are to be revised, historically evaluated and translated and presented together with their illustrations and various metadata in a dynamic digital text corpus, which is being created in collaboration with the Cologne Center for eHumanities. The results of the historical analysis will be presented in a multi-volume monographic work that refers to the digital text corpus.

Picture credits

P.Cologne VII 314: Tax object declaration (July 8, 257 BC)