UCL Department of Greek and Latin

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Research Projects

This page includes a list of research projects our staff are currently involved with.

• The Oxyrhynchus Project
  
• The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names
• The Augustine Lexicon
• The Keeling Colloquia and Lectures
  
• The Hawara Papyri

You might also wish to see:

• the list of staff and their research interests
• the list of Post-Graduate research interests

The Oxyrhynchus Project

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Papyrus was the writing material of the Greeks and Romans, but little has survived in the archaeological sites of Greece and Italy, because the ground is too wet. Egypt, on the other hand, offers ideal climatic conditions; and in the towns of Egypt, for a thousand years from Alexander the Great to the Arab conquest, Greek immigrants and their descendants formed a colonial ruling class which continued to speak, write and read Greek. Their books and papers have survived under the sand: random salvage from the houses, offices and libraries of these Greek-speaking communities. Systematic excavation for papyri began in the 1890s, and the finds proved revolutionary not only for the study of Hellenistic and Roman history, but also for the study of Classical and Hellenistic Greek literature. The sand preserves a mass of documents of all kinds, of private and official letters, and of broken books: above all, fragments of works which have not otherwise survived at all, since they were lost in the Middle Ages.

Oxyrhynchus (‘the City of the Sharp-nosed Fish’), 100 miles south of Cairo, proved the most productive of papyrus sites. The excavators of the Egypt Exploration Society found the papyri in rubbish mounds thirty feet deep; more than 40,000 pieces and scraps were recovered in ten years’ digging (1897-1907), and deposited in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The Department of Greek & Latin of University College London, which houses the only Chair of Papyrology in the United Kingdom, is involved in a long-term research project based on this collection of papyri, in cooperation with the Faculty of Literae Humaniores of Oxford University and under the auspices of the British Academy.

To date, some 4500 items have been published, in 72 volumes; of these, some 360 come from works of Greek literature otherwise lost. Publication procedes at the rate of one volume per year. Collaborators from many European countries are involved in this project.

The International Summer School in Papyrology was held here in 2003.

The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names

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The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names is a long-running project established to collect and publish all ancient Greek personal names, drawing on the full range of written sources from the 8th century B.C. down to the late Roman Empire. From its beginnings, the Lexicon has involved international collaboration, with scholars from many countries being invited to contribute material and advice.

The Augustine Lexicon

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This is an international project to produce a standard reference work on St Augustine, of which a number of fascicles have been published already (for details of which, visit the publisher's webpage).

The Keeling Colloquia and Lectures

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Together with the UCL Philosophy department, and through the generosity of a private donor, the Department organises a series of Keeling Memorial Colloquia on the relation between modern and ancient philosophy

The Hawara Papyri

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This website provides information about the Hawara Papyri, and provides what are in many cases the first ever photographs of the published papyri.