Mark Depauw

Trismegistos: An Interdisciplinary Platform for Ancient World Texts and Related Information

Trismegistos (TM) is a KU Leuven coordinated metadata platform for the study of texts from the Ancient World. This article provides a survey of its development, from the roots in a prosopography of Ptolemaic Egypt to an all-encompassing database with information about texts from Egypt for the period from 800 BC to AD 800. The current technical setup is detailed in a next section, with special attention for the structure of the many interconnected relational databases. A final section presents the current expansion to include material from outside Egypt, particularly Latin (and to some extent also Greek) inscriptions, in the framework of the CIP-Europeana EAGLE project. It also discusses some potential technological innovations to facilitate data exchange in a linked Open Data environment.

How Christian was Fourth Century Egypt? Onomastic Perspectives on Conversion

Abstract In 1982 Roger Bagnall published a ground-breaking article about conversion to Christianity in fourth century Egypt. Using onomastic data for individuals in seleced texts, he tried to demonstrate that the growth of the Christian element in the population was early and rapid, rising to 90% by the end of the century. A new date for one of the documents led to a revision of the pace of growth in 1987, but his method was never tested on other datasets. In this article we apply an adapted vesion of his method to a large new dataset, containing all attestations of personal names in fourth century documentary papyri and ostraca. We also investigate the accuracy of Christian names as a binary test for Christianity, and estimate the mutiplication factor which can be applied to determine the number of Christians. Our results are similar to the curve which can be distilled from Bagnall’s adapted results in 1987, with 20-30% Christians around 313, a Christian majority around 350 and virtually complete Christianization around the middle of the fifth century.

Mapping the Demotic Epistolary Framework through Network Visualisation

Summary In this article, network visualisation is presented as a new way to explore the formulaic framework of the Demotic papyrus letters. It also serves as an introduction of formal network analysis to the field of Demotic studies. This approach presents the evidence in a new light, focussing on the combination of formulae rather than on the phrases themselves, resulting in fresh observations on epistolary practices.

Developing Onomastic Gazetteers and Prosopographies for the Ancient World Through Named Entity Recognition and Graph Visualization: Some Examples from Trismegistos People

Developing prosopographies or onomastic lists in a non-digital environment used to be a painstaking and time-consuming exercise, involving manual labour by teams of researchers, often taking decades. For some scholarly disciplines from the ancient world this is still true, especially those studying non-alphabetical writing systems that lack a uniform transcription system, e.g. Demotic. But for many others, such as Greek and Latin, digital full text corpora in Unicode are now available, often even freely accessible. In this paper we illustrate, on the basis of Trismegistos, how data collection through Named Entity Recognition and visualization through Social Network Analysis have huge potential to speed up the creation of onomastic lists and the development of prosopographies.

«Soternalia» from Deir El-Bahri, including two coffin lids with demotic inscriptions

Publication de huit «Soternalia» provenant des fouilles menees par le Metropolitan Museum of Art a Deir el-Bahari durant les annees vingt du siecle dernier. Les deux couvercles de sarcophages avec des inscriptions demotiques, les deux cuves et les trois autres morceaux de sarcophages ainsi que le fragment de linceul sont tous dates du second siecle de notre ere. Ils ont ete reutilises a la fin du troisieme siecle comme le montrent les photographies originales. Leur lieu de conservation actuel est inconnu; ils sont probablement perdus.