About Trismegistos Collections
This database providing information about collections of papyrological and epigraphic texts spread all over the world is the result of a collaboration between the Leuven Homepage of Papyrus Collections (LHPC; Willy Clarysse / K. Vandorpe) and the project Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in Graeco-Roman Egypt (Cologne, Mark Depauw).
Starting point of the original LHPC was the section "Repertorio dei luoghi nei quali esistono collezioni di testi e documenti papiracei" compiled by S. Daris in the handbook of O.Montevecchi, La Papirologia (Milan 1988), pp. 437-470, 610-613. In order to make the collections better accessible to scholars, details about the addresses and contact persons of the institutions were added to this compilation, and in March 2000, during a colloquium in the Royal Academy in Brussels, twenty-five collections were presented by papyrologists closely involved in the task of keeping the manuscripts. Attention was paid to how the papyri are kept, inventoried, digitalised and put on line. The proceedings of this meeting, printed as Papyrus Collections World Wide, were also included and reworked in the online version.
The original website provided information on collections of papyrus and ostraca scattered in almost 30 countries and 350 institutions. In early 2005 the project Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in Graeco-Roman Egypt and the LHPC decided to develop a tool permitting an interdisciplinary approach to the collections holding the documents included in the new platform Trismegistos. The database structure was slightly adapted to accommodate inventory numbers, and new collections were added for the documents in Demotic and other languages, but also for epigraphic texts, which had not been included up to then.
The result of this cooperation is the current survey of 1388 collections in 50 countries. For some, only basic identification is provided, but for others practical information is still being kept up to date by the LHPC. Inclusion in the platform Trismegistos has made it possible to find all texts kept in a collection, or only those related to a specific subset of the texts, such as demotic texts only (through DAHT) or LDAB texts only. The other way round, full details of a collection are only a mouse-click away from the text information.