Demotic and Abnormal Hieratic Texts
An online database of metadata.
Mark Depauw
(K.U.Leuven / Universität zu Köln)
Version 1: October 2006
Demotic and Abnormal Hieratic Texts [DAHT] is a online database of metadata. Its aim is to provide information about all published (and semi-published) texts written in these two scripts, currently some 13120 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. In a first stage the number of fields shown is rather limited: only the various editions, present and former whereabouts, writing surface, type, and date are listed. Even fewer fields (publication, inventory, material, and language) are searchable, so that the service currently provided is little more than a converter between inventory and publication numbers or a tool to find the most recent edition of a text. This will change in the months to come, when more fields will become available.
DAHT has been created as part of the project Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in Graeco-Roman Egypt, sponsored by the Sofja Kovalevskaja Prize of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation awarded to me in 2004. Far from starting from scratch, however, the database builds upon two unpublished digital tools which were put at the project's disposal. The first was a database with limited information about 1786 Demotic papyri, compiled by H.-J. Thissen (Universität zu Köln). The second was the nascent database (ca. 2000 entries) with more elaborate metadata of Demotic documentary texts (papyri, ostraca, and some other) which was one of the relational databases forming the digital version of the Prosopographia Ptolemaica (K.U.Leuven).
The information of these two overlapping databases was brought together in a newly conceived database format developed jointly by our project and the Leuven Homepage of Papyrus Collections. This not only had the advantage that database solutions already available need not to be reinvented, but also that all records, independent of their language or writing surface, could be part of an integrated system, the platform Trismegistos which is launched together with the DAHT.
Concurrently with the merger of the two unpublished databases into the new system and the elimination of double entries, new Demotic records were entered on the basis of the Berichtigungliste of Demotic Documents, a non-digital tool listing all published Demotic texts for which corrections had been published. Although itself at the time unpublished, its compiler Sven Vleeming was so kind as to send a preliminary version at the start of the project, which greatly facilitated data entry.
Because publication numbers are a relatively new - and not entirely uncontroversial - appearance in Demotic Studies, we have decided to establish a direct link between the digital version of the Demotistische Literaturübersicht [DL] and the DAHT. It is thus possible to start from a bibliographic entry in the DL and find all related publication entries in the metadata database. And, the other way round, the full bibliographic data are only a mouse-click away for all abbreviations used in the DAHT.