Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Papyrus project at Lund University

1
My university library, Lund university library, in Sweden, holds about 800 Greek papyri from Egypt, of which only about 50 have been published ("P. Lund"). Thus, the main part of the material, mainly documentary papyri, has not been catalogued and has remained unavailable stuffed away somewhere in the library. However, last year a new project was initiated in co-operation with APIS (”Advanced Papyrological Information System”), by which the whole collection will eventually be made available through the Internet. The project is moving rather slow, but I have just been invited by the responsible person at the library to come and inspect the material, which will be quite interesting, although I do not think there will be any big surprises (e.g. identifable Christian texts...).

The medieval manuscripts of the library have already been digitized in the St Laurentius digital library. There are no GNT MSS among this collection, but curiously one of the oldest manuscripts containing Apophtegmata Patrum, "Medeltidshandskrift 54," which was donated by no other than Adolf Deissman "to Scandinavia". That is another story, which I might blog about some other time. Incidentally, I have helped a collague of mine who is writing his dissertation on the Apophtegmata to transcribe parts of this manuscript.

1 comment

  1. Hi Tommy,

    I would be interested to know the literary levels of those papyri, especially in terms of Atticistic tendencies (e.g. HLQAN -> HLQON etc). Could you keep me posted of the progress of Lund's project?

    Timo

    ReplyDelete