Abbey of Montserrat, the Archive of Historical Manuscripts of the Jesuits of Catalonia, and the Fundación Pastor de Estudios Clásicos possess the three most important papyraceous collections of the country, which together gather around 10,000 fragments in the writing systems and languages present in Egypt from 10th Century BC until AD 10th Century. Our project works, on one part, on the editing of texts preserved in them, paying special attention to its production context: documents, mostly of a social-religious and legal-administrative nature, are related to the double aspect of human behavior in social cohabitation: their relation with other humans in society and State, their relation with their god/s and their own religiosity.

Additionally, the project develops a digital technological investigation working on two aspects: the field of images, applied to the pieces that have presented special difficulties when handling them (carbonized fragments and those that have been cut and pasted in the process of buying and selling of the documents in the moment of their purchase), and in the field of electronic coding of texts written through writing systems such as Coptic, Arabic, and very specially Demotic. We are also going to advance in the investigation about nature of the papyraceous through execution of physical and chemical analysis that we purpose for the study of inks in order to perfect papyraceous methodology used for chronological and geographical location of the documents.

Starting date: 01/01/2016

Finishing date: 31/12/2018