Projects in the Papyrus Department

Basic Research on John's Gospel in Bohairic

Among the ancient translations of the Greek New Testament, those in the Coptic dialects Bohairic and Sahidic are of central importance. They reflect rare variant readings from a very early stage in the textual development of the New Testament, which are relevant to the textual criticism of the Gospels in Greek. The project deals with the Bohairic version of John's Gospel, which was last treated with a critical edition (by George W. Horner) more than a hundred years ago. It aims to test the reliability of Horner's edition and to lay the groundwork for a new critical edition of the Bohairic Gospel of John. Manuscript collations will be used to lay the foundation for computer-assisted automatic comparisons. For this purpose, about 5000 manuscript scans will be converted into content-decoded pages and selected sections will be checked with regard to their content.

With the establishment of Ptolemaic rule, numerous immigrants come to Egypt from all parts of the Greek-speaking world. Original testimonies of emigrants have been preserved in documentary papyri, which speak about their experiences of integration and acculturation in their new homeland. This study will address the living situation, but also the complex processes involved in the formation of new identities, and examine the socio-cultural influence through which immigrants shaped local societies. By considering Greek and demotic sources, a new methodological approach will be developed.

On the basis of thousands of papyrus documents, the project investigates the prices and price trends of food and the cost of living in Late Antique and Early Arab Egypt (4th-8th century AD). Only the numerous surviving papyrus documents provide unaltered and very concrete price data in sufficient numbers to evaluate them quantitatively. This study represents a pioneering work, which for the first time attempts to investigate, on a conceivably broad source basis, the economic changes that accompanied the transition from Byzantine to Arab Egypt.

Hundreds of papyrus documents provide detailed information about a centralized system of public archives in the Roman province of Egypt. This project involves a comprehensive survey of the relevant documentary evidence based on an examination of the papyri in the original, the layout, and the administrative processing traces. The project aims to elucidate the particularities of Roman provincial archives and poses questions of continuity and change with respect to the Ptolemaic period. In addition, the project will place papyrological sources in dialogue with testimonies from other provinces in order to determine whether papyri document archival institutions that were generally present in the Roman Empire.