Digitising the (manu)Script Worlds of Ancient Egypt

Note: This talk will be part of the UCLDH Painless Introduction series starting in the new academic year, October 2011

As part of the UCLDH Painless Introduction series, Stephen Quirke and Tim Weyrich present the material and digital dimensions of one of UCL's hidden treasures: several thousand fragments of ancient Egyptian papyri from about 1800 BC, discovered across a town-site near al-Lahun in 1889 by an excavation team led by Flinders Petrie.

Preserved today at the Petrie Museum, UCL, they are famous in Egyptology as the most ancient snapshot of writing in a town, including mathematical, medical, literary and ritual manuscripts as well as personal letters and accounts.

Our speakers will give an overview of the conservation history of the papyri, explaining traditional approaches to Egyptian manuscript preservation and study, focussed on the recording of similarity and difference across the collection. The potential of traditional, manual methods, although ably exploited in the past, leaves ample room for complementary contributions by new technologies.

Recent work has produced advances in handwriting research and study of the papyri, and opened up new opportunities for structural analysis of both the medium and the script, previously uncommon in Egyptology. A demonstration of a newly developed scanning procedure to obtain high-quality reproduction of the papyrus material structure will be also given.

Stephen Quirke is Professor in Egyptology at the Institute of Archaeology and Curator at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology; Tim Weyrich is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics group at the UCL Department of Computer Science and Associate Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities.