Aramaic Texts from Egypt
An online database of metadata.
Alexander Schütze / Mark Depauw
(Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München / Universität zu Köln and K.U.Leuven)
Version 1: July 2007
Aramaic Texts from Egypt [ATE] is an online database of metadata. Its aim is to provide information about all published (and semi-published) as well as some unpublished texts from Egypt written in Aramaic script, currently over 850 items. No doubt we have missed some, and data entry is of course a continuous process, but we hope our current coverage is sufficient for the tool to be useful.
The fields shown give information about the various editions, present and former whereabouts, writing surface, script, type and date. For the time being only the fields inventory, publication, editor, script, provenance and type are searchable, which nevertheless already allows the user to go beyond converting between inventory and publication numbers or finding the most recent edition of a text.
The foundation for the ATE-database has been laid by the project Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in Graeco-Roman Egypt, sponsored by the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation awarded to Mark Depauw in late 2004. In the beginning of 2006 all texts included in Bezalel Porten's and Ada Yardeni's Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Egypt (4 volumes, 1986-1999) were entered into the database done by Sandra Bronischewski (about 626 entries). From summer 2006 onwards new records were entered by Alexander Schütze on the basis of new publications (in the widest sense of the word) as well as older descriptions in lists or catalogues, e. g. the numerous texts of J. B. Segal's Aramaic Texts from North Saqq�ra (1983) that were not included in the Textbook. It is a particular feature of the Aramaic texts from Egypt that many of them were published several times. Currently, all main (i.e. monographical) editions besides the Textbook are searchable in the ATE-database.
The ATE is fully implemented in Trismegistos, which means that direct links have been established with Collections and Places (the latter under construction) to find other texts kept in the same location or with the same provenance. We have also created a directly linked general bibliographic database which we called TM Bib, so that the full bibliographic data are only a mouse-click away for abbreviations used in the ATE. And, the other way round, it is possible to start from a bibliographic entry in the TM Bib and find all related publication entries in Trismegistos, from where the ATE is immediately accessible. This connection furthermore permits to show additional bibliographic references below the database entries.