Ancient Lives

Papyrology is a new discipline. The first Greek papyrus from Egypt known in Europe was the so-called Charta Borgiana, a list of canal-workers for the year 193 AD in the site of Tebtynis. The papyrus, which is now housed at the National Museum in Naples, came from a wood sycamore box containing 50 papyri of [...]

In the scanning process some background material was often extracted along with the papyrus image. We are aware of this issue and we are gradually removing that material from the website, but you too can help in this process. Many of you have already contributed to the odd-one-out by marking rulers and ‘not-papyri’ with the [...]

The Match Button allows you to find correspondences to words in other published texts. It encompasses two search engines, one for literary texts (“Matched Documents”) and one for documentary papyri (“Matched Letters”). The Match button will give you an idea of the possible occurrences of a word in texts of comparable content. Match is not [...]

Papyrology is a compound word formed by two members, “papyrus” (ἡ πάπυρος) and “logos” (ὁ λόγος, «reason», «study», suffix –λογία «discipline»), indicating the scientific study of papyri. The English word «papyrus» is borrowed from Latin, which explains why the correct plural form of the word is «papyri» (think of the second declination), and not «papyruses» [...]

Dear indomitable Ancient Lives warriors, thank you for your renewed support. We are currently working on putting more images into the system by the end of the year. Technical problems still persist, but we plan on addressing these issues in conjunction with the uploading of new images. Again, we thank you for your patience in [...]

Dear strenuous Ancient Lives web users, one of our last posts concerned the differences between Literary and Documentary Papyri in terms of both writing and content. Today’s post will illustrate a third category of texts: Subliterary Papyri. I know this term may sound a little bit over technical and pretentious, but being aware of the [...]

Dear all (users, newcomers and bystanders), When I started working on this project one month ago, I immediately realized that many of you had already successfully identified a large number of papyri from the collection. I am still going through all of your identifications and have approved many of them. Once again, the Ancient Lives [...]

You might notice that images to some of the papyri you’ve already classified have disappeared. We’ve removed them following a request from the Egypt Exploration Society, who own the Oxyrhynchus collection of papyri. I’ll be meeting them and we hope to bring the images back soon, but in the meantime don’t worry – your hard work is [...]

Dear steadfast, indefatigable web users, back to the blog after an intense week full of new identifications and suggestions. A special thanks goes to all of those users that left a comment (or a question) in the Talk site during this last week: alias2,  Tejas_0,  lmct,  Mgt, sftommy, jansenniek, paratsoukli, lindanewman, mpvgl, Demon22, Ran-chan, foolover12, [...]