Papyri preserved by the dry climate of Egypt are an unparalleled source of information about the Ancient World. However, their large number, diversity and current dispersion have impeded a comprehensive grasp of their nature and content. In particular, palaeography, the study of handwritings that has the potential to unveil where, when, and by whom a text was written, still relies on experts' assertions that rarely reach consensus. New technological advances in Computer Science, notably in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing now allow building the big picture of the writing culture of Greco-Roman Egypt and developing scientific analyses of scripts. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation for five years, the Starting Grant project EGRAPSA (literally “I have written” in Ancient Greek) aims at providing a new theoretical framework to the palaeography of Greek papyri. Starting from sound evidence, it aims at retracing the evolutions of handwritings, generating a model that, in turn, can contribute to organizing the papyrological documentation in a coherent panorama, improving the solidity of dates and writer identifications made on palaeographical grounds. The ground-breaking dimension of the project is to encompass the entire papyrological documentation in its full complexity to measure similarities and explain evolutions by focusing on the reconstruction of the dynamics of writing, thus to literally re-trace handwritings.
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[Website University of Basel]