Crossing boundaries - complex scribal practices

Reconstruction of the erased inscription on Papyrus Turin Cat.1906+2047+1939 verso © Elena L. Hertel.

The Virtual Light Table.

Crossing boundaries to uncover new insights on Ancient Egypt Artisans in the ancient Egyptian community of Deir el-Medina produced a large volume of written materials, which represents a valuable source of information about life and society at the time.

We spoke to Professor Antonio Loprieno, Elena Hertel and Stephan Unter about their work in analysing these texts and developing new research methods which cross disciplinary boundaries.

The ancient Egyptian village of Deir el-Medina was home to a highly literate community of artisans working on the Pharaonic tombs during the New Kingdom period (1350 - 1050 BCE), and the written materials they produced are a valuable source of information about life and society at the time. As the Principal Investigator of the Crossing Boundaries project, Professor Antonio Loprieno is analysing some of these materials, held in an archive at the Egyptian Museum of Turin. “The vast majority of the documents from Deir el-Medina relate to a period after the era of Tutankhamun, usually called the Ramesside period, towards the end of the second millennium BC,” he outlines.

The documents include thousands of small fragments as well as larger manuscripts and cover a range of topics, which researchers divide into essentially two broad categories.

“We have the more documentary texts, that relate to the economic aspects of everyday life. So things like transactions, bills and

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work reports,” explains Professor Loprieno.

“Then there are literary works, some of which have a religious dimension, as well as entertainment literature. There is however a degree of crossover.”

documents, but then there’s also a sociological or cultural dimension. So how did writing work in the setting of Deir el-Medina?” asks Professor Loprieno. The compact nature of the Turin archive is of great benefit in this

From looking at this large body of materials, we hope to develop a deeper knowledge of intellectual life in Deir el-Medina and societal interaction in ancient Egypt during the Late Bronze Age. Complex scribal practices These written materials are now the focus of attention in the project, with researchers looking at papyri containing different types of information and investigating the scribal practices that lay behind their production.

The term ‘scribal practices’ here refers to more than just the act of writing things down.

“There is a kind of dual meaning. On the one hand a scribe was someone who wrote down

respect, enabling concentrated observation and analysis of the available material. The traditional view is that these documents were written by professional scribes or writers, yet this is now the subject of debate amongst researchers. “Were these writers a social group? Or a specific profession? Did only the elites write? Were women involved? We do find some limited evidence of women writing,” says Elena Hertel.

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As a PhD student working on the project, Hertel’s focus is more on the manuscripts rather than the people who wrote them however.

While a variety of different materials were used in ancient Egypt as a surface for writing, such as stone for example, Hertel is looking primarily at heterogenous papyri, i.e. manuscripts inscribed with several texts of different genres and by different authors. “Papyrus was relatively expensive and it took a fairly long time to make,” she says. It is often thought that cheaper and more abundant materials were used to record less important information, while papyrus was used more selectively, a topic that Hertel is exploring in her research. “When you wanted to write something more prestigious, something that you maybe wanted to keep for longer, then you would use papyrus,” she explains. “The overall picture is complex however, as a lot of the papyri contain little jottings, and some of the text was sometimes erased. They did various things that we, from a modern perspective, would not associate with important writings.”

Many of these documents are less structured than might be expected. For instance notes on when wages were paid, or how much fish was delivered to a customer on a particular day, can seem almost chaotic to a modern observer.

“People sometimes just wrote some information down, then maybe skipped a few days and wrote it on another day. Then they wrote a completely different note on the same papyrus,” outlines Hertel. Through analysis of these papyri, researchers hope to gain fresh insights into ancient Egyptian culture. “From looking at this large body of materials, we hope to develop a

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deeper knowledge of economic transactions in Deir el-Medina, and societal interaction in ancient Egypt during the late Bronze Age. We hope to gain new insights into the economy of ancient Egypt, as well as its religious and cultural life,” says Professor Loprieno.

Machine learning A further dimension of the project centres on using machine learning techniques to classify and reconstruct the thousands of fragments of papyri held in the Turin archive. This work has its roots in a desire to open up access to these documents. “We want to edit and publish these

thousands of fragments, which come in different dimensions,” explains Professor Loprieno.

Machine learning techniques could play an important role in these terms, for example in identifying fragments from the same scribe, a topic PhD student Stephan Unter is investigating.

“We are asking whether machine learning could help us classify the fragments more efficiently.

For example, can a machine identify a specific scribe where a human can’t?” he explains.

“However, neural networks typically need a large quantity of annotated training material before they can learn different classes and make generalisations. We want to train neural

Traces of previous inscriptions on Papyrus Turin Cat.1906+2047+1939 verso © Elena L. Hertel.

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Crossing Boundaries Understanding Complex Scribal Practices in Ancient Egypt

Digital tracing of erased writings with a graphics tablet.

Project Objectives

Crossing Boundaries is an interdisciplinary heritage studies project connecting Egyptology and informatics, in which two European universities (University of Basel and University of Liège) and a major research museum (the Museo Egizio Torino) join forces in an open science effort to make accessible the contents of an Egyptian archive from the Late Bronze Age (around 1200 BC). To achieve this goal, Crossing Boundaries draws its competences from philology, material studies, and machine learning.

Project Funding

Crossing Boundaries is financed by the Swiss National Fund for Scientific Research (CH) and by the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (B).

Contact Details

Project Coordinator, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Antonio Loprieno, Egyptology Department of Ancient Civilizations, University of Basel President of All European Academies (ALLEA), Berlin Petersgraben 51, 4051 Basel, Switzerland T: + 41 61 207 33 31 E: a.loprieno@unibas.ch W: http://crossing-boundaries.unibas.ch Elena L. Hertel Antonio Loprieno Stephan M. Unter

Antonio Loprieno is a professor of Egyptology and History of Institutions at the University of Basel. Before returning to Europe, he taught many years at UCLA. His research fields are Egyptian linguistics, cultural studies and institutional history. For a recent contribution see https://doi. org/10.1002/9781119193814.ch26.

Elena L. Hertel is a PhD candidate in Egyptology at Basel University. She studied Egyptology and Classical Archaeology at the Universities of Heidelberg, Turin, and Leiden. Her research focuses on ancient manuscripts and the materiality of inscribed objects. She specializes in ancient Egyptian cursive scripts (hieratic, abnormal hieratic, and demotic).

Stephan M. Unter is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Basel. He acquired a MA in Egyptology (Ludwig Maximilians University Munich) and a MSc in Computer Science (University of Basel). At Crossing Boundaries, he combines his interest in layout and graphical structuring of Egyptian papyri with machine learning applications.

networks on around 200 larger documents and then apply them on these 11,000 fragments.”

The challenge for Unter is to work out how to train these machines with respect to specific aspects of the available material, such as colour and texture. The larger documents are used for training neural networks, as they can be separated into smaller fragments which researchers know came from the same original source. “From this point I can train the machine so that it looks for specific features that might tell you which fragments belong to the same document, and which definitely don’t,” outlines Unter. This could then enable the identification of fragments that fit together, while other features aside from colour and texture could also be used. “We could have a look at the handwriting on different fragments. Can the machine identify whether the writing styles are the same?” asks Unter.

Crossing boundaries This represents a significant departure from traditional study methods in the Egyptology field, which typically involved looking at sources one by one. The aim is to show that this approach can help Egyptologists uncover interesting new details. “We want to give Egyptologists the sense that we need more digital data, or digital annotation to material, to gather new insights,” outlines Unter. This is not about replacing traditional methods, but rather crossing disciplinary boundaries to develop a new tool

that will help researchers gain fresh insights and probe deeper into the culture of ancient Egypt, changing the way information is accessed in the Egyptology field. “This is a new tool, a new way of seeing things. But in order to use that, we need first to have a kind of proof-of-concept, which is what I’m working on,” continues Unter. “We need to show that we can achieve something with our material that we are working on, which will then encourage others to make digital annotations.”

A software application called Virtual Light Table (VLT) is under development in the project, which is designed to reconstruct entire documents from fragmentary material. This application will be published on an open-source basis, and Unter believes it will be a valuable tool for both Egyptologists and also researchers in other fields. “This is an example of how other scholars, be it in our field or even outside the scope of Egyptology, can benefit from our work,” he says. A key objective in the project is to publish the entire corpus of material from the Turin archive online, which could also help researchers form new relationships and share their findings with Egyptologists looking at other periods. “Egyptologists are interested in ancient Egypt throughout its historical development,” says Professor Loprieno.

“There are specialisations in the field, and there is what we might call a Deir el-Medina community. There is a much larger community of Egyptologists, which is interested in other periods and other regions of the country.”

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