Online: The Trismegistos project

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 122639 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; Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung) 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.