Grammateus is a digital research environment developed at the University of Geneva by a team of researchers (Bonagura, Chang, Ferretti, Fogarty and Nury) under the supervision of Schubert, with initial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation for the years 2019 to 2023. The project aims to offer an overview of attested types of Greek documentary papyri from Egypt, proposing a new typology based not only on the content of papyrological texts but also on material aspects of the papyri, such as structural elements and the style of the script. As the project editors state, ‘typology’ refers to the analysis of defining criteria to identify and understand the rules followed by scribes in Graeco-Roman Egypt to prepare documents. The Ptolemaic and Roman periods (late fourth century bce to early fourth century ce) are fully covered, and current project developments will include the Byzantine period (early fourth century to 642 ce).
The project is based on a database with documents that are, whenever possible, complete and accompanied by images available in stable repositories. Documents are arranged by typological categories and are collected in corpora of papyri for each category. An essential feature of Grammateus is that it is linked in real time to the database of Papyri.info (https://papyri.info/) to keep track of any possible changes in the Greek documentary papyri published in that resource.
The corpus and its classification are available through a web platform in Open Access with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-4.0). This web resource has been specifically conceived instead of a traditional print publication to offer open data and be connected with existing digital resources for digital papyrology that provide access to texts, metadata, and images, such as the database of Papyri.info and the portal Trismegistos (https://www.trismegistos.org/), which in turn ingest data from Grammateus.
The project website is structured in sections that facilitate the user experience and offer detailed information about Grammateus’ aim, its corpus, the methodology behind the research environment and instructions for consulting the database. Of particular relevance are the sections ‘Introduction’ and ‘Typology’ that extensively describe key concepts and characteristics of the collected papyri and the reasons for a new classification compared to previous scholarship that tried to map typologies of Greek documentary papyri, mostly relying on their content.
The core of the web resource is constituted by the section ‘Papyri’, which provides open access to the database that currently contains more than 1,600 papyri and can be searched using filters such as keyword, type, subtype, variation, text sections, shape of papyrus, direction of fibres, provenance and century. Instructions and video tutorials help readers use these filters and their parameters to obtain results.
Each item in the database is provided with a Trismegistos (TM) unique identifier, the description of the relevant papyrus and the text of the document, which is based on the encoded text in the XML EpiDoc format and whose structural elements are transformed and visible on the HTML page thanks to the EpiDoc Reference Stylesheet (T. Elliott, Z. Au, G. Bodard, H. Cayless, C. Lanz, F. Lawrence, S. Vandebilt, R. Viglianti, et al., ‘EpiDoc Example Stylesheets (version 9)’ [2008–2021]: https://github.com/EpiDoc/Stylesheets). Some images are directly visible on the webpage next to the text of the papyrus with the Mirador viewer, if they come from projects that conform to the International Image Interoperability Framework standard (IIIF) or from the Oxford Papyrology public data on Figshare. The page is accompanied by links to the corresponding element in Papyri.info, the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der griechischen Papyrusurkunden Ägyptens (HGV) and Trismegistos for further metadata and descriptions.
The sections ‘Compare’ and ‘Syntax’ allow users to compare two categories of Greek documentary papyri by selecting two categories from those offered by the project (e.g. ‘private letter’ and ‘condolence’) and to consult a rich list of ‘formulas’ that refer to a syntax of structural elements of documentary papyri and that derive from their description (e.g. ‘heading’).
A section is devoted to showing the provenance of the papyri collected in the Grammateus database on a map created with Peripleo, a browser-based tool for mapping things related to places (https://github.com/britishlibrary/peripleo). Finally, a page lists the project’s bibliography, also available in a group library on the open-source reference management software Zotero (https://www.zotero.org/groups/2288077/grammateus). At the time of writing, the library contains 304 bibliographic items, including publications by the editors on the Grammateus project.
To comply with data citation recommendations, the project is provided with a stable Digital Object Identifier (DOI) through Yareta, the institutional repository of the University of Geneva (https://doi.org/10/gsc68x), where underlying data in XML format from Grammateus is stored and downloadable for sharing and reuse.
Considering all these characteristics, Grammateus serves as a good example of a digital resource developed with a specific research question aimed at contributing to intellectual development in documentary papyrology while adhering to current best practices in the field of Linked Open Data (LOD) for the ancient world. The expertise of the project editors ensures data quality and transparency. Moreover, integrating Grammateus with external reference resources for digital papyrology addresses the well-known issue of data sustainability and preservation (cf. H.A. Cayless, ‘Sustaining Linked Ancient World Data’, in: M. Berti [ed.], Digital Classical Philology. Ancient Greek and Latin in the Digital Revolution [2019]). In this regard, the project’s current development (2023–2026) is to enhance data sustainability and integration with existing tools. This phase of the project presents a valuable opportunity to share more structured data on the vocabulary of the typology of Greek documentary papyri as proposed by the editors of Grammateus.
The project’s intended audience includes experienced researchers and students, who may consult Grammateus to investigate ancient documents preserved on papyri and get acquainted with digital technologies applied to studying ancient artefacts and past languages. This makes this resource a precious tool in scholarly and teaching environments.
