About Trismegistos

Trismegistos [TM], called after the famous epithet of Hermes - Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom and writing who also played a major role in Greek religion and philosophy, is a platform aiming to surmount barriers of language and discipline in the study of late period Egypt and the Nile valley (roughly BC 800 - 800 AD). It brings together a variety of projects dealing with metadata, mainly of published documents.

Its core component is Trismegistos Texts, which includes papyrological and epigraphic texts, not only in Greek, Latin, and Egyptian in its various scripts (Demotic, hieroglyphic, hieratic and Coptic), but also in Meroitic, Aramaic, Arabic, Nabataean, Carian, and other languages (currently 105563 records). Most of the metadata are provided by partner projects, normally limited to texts in a certain language, on a type of writing surface (e.g. papyrus) or of a certain type (e.g. literary vs. documentary).

Because Trismegistos wants to facilitate cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research, the project Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in Graeco-Roman Egypt (Cologne, Mark Depauw) has collaborated with several projects of the K.U.Leuven to develop tools permitting an interdisciplinary approach to the collections holding the texts, the places where the texts where found and written, or the archives to which the texts belong.

  1. The Collections database, built on the Leuven Homepage of Papyrus Collections, is a set of currently some 1200 institutional and private collections of texts. It is possible to look for a collection and find all related Trismegistos texts, or only those related to a specific partner.
  2. The Places database, expanding the geographical database of the Fayum project of the K.U.Leuven, is a set of currently some 3600 places in (and some outside) Egypt. Right now, the tool is not integrated in Trismegistos: it only allows searches for specific locations and provides topographical and onomastic information. A direct link to all Trismegistos texts with that provenance is foreseen for the immediate future.
  3. The Archives database, which is a Leuven undertaking, has been fully integrated in the system: in Trismegistos links to the archives to which the texts belong are provided, while in the Leuven Homepage of Papyrus Archives a list of all texts of a specific archive is only a mouse-click away.

Finally, because abbreviations are often different in the various disciplines, we have also started creating a bibliographic database TM Bib which resolves many of the short references we use in Trismegistos. The other way round it also wants to facilitate the search for all texts in a specific publication. This is work under construction and much remains to be done here. For one specific subset, however, in casu the publications dealing with Demotic and Abnormal Hieratic, the Demotistische Literaturübersicht already provides a much higher standard of bibliographic information.