News from Ancient Lives

Dear Ancient Lives web users,

My name is Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello (imarthot) and I recently joined the Ancient Lives Project as Research Associate in Papyrology at the University of Minnesota.

With your help, hundreds of fragments from Ancient Literature and everyday documents have been identified.

We have been very busy lately working on a new interface for the website, more efficient and user-friendly, with up-to-date technology, which should be launched in a couple of months. That is the reason why the “Blog” has been quiet lately and why the academic team has not been very active in the “Talk” section, but you should now see more activity there.

For those who are just starting with Ancient Lives, here is an overview of the more important articles from the blog:

Presentation of the project:

“Welcome to Ancient Lives“ July 26, 2011

“Our team, our goals” Oct 1, 2011 (see last paragraph about the Oxyrhynchus collection)

Methodology of Ancient Lives:

“What do all those buttons mean?” Oct 9, 2012

“How to identify a papyrus fragment” Oct 8, 2011 (the “Match” option is not available now, do not take the post from March 28, 2012 into account)

“Rulers and ‘not-papyri’”, March 28, 2012

Basics:

“The Greek Alphabet”, Feb 14, 2013 (see details on some letters in “More tips for Documentary Papyri”, Dec 1 2012)

“Greek letter combinations”, July 22 2012

“Abbreviations and symbols”, Nov 12, 2011 (see more examples of abbreviations in “Cursive Script” from May 29, 2012)

“Cursive Script”, May 29, 2012: gives three lines with transcription and translation and then more detailed explanations of some abbreviations and ligatures

“More tips for Documentary Papyri”, Dec 1, 2012 (examples of epsilon, rho, upsilon, beta and ligatures)

“Symbols in Papyri”, Oct 30, 2012

“Numbers in Greek Papyri”, June 1 2012

“Geographical, Personal and Month Names”, July 15, 2012 (common vocabulary in documentary papyri written in cursive script)

Introduction to Papyrology:

“Papyrology and Papyri”, Nov 28, 2011

“Literary VS Documentary Papyri”, Oct 15, 2011

“Subliterary Papyri”, Nov 9, 2011

“An overview of Ancient Writing Surfaces”, March 5, 2013

To go further:

“At the Dawn of the Discipline”, March 28, 2012 (a short History of Early Papyrology)

“Posidippus : the Milan Papyrus”, January 31, 2013