Demotic and Abnormal Hieratic Texts

"Demotic and Abnormal Hieratic Texts [DAHT] is a online database of metadata. Its aim is to provide information about all published (and semi-published) texts written in these two scripts, currently some 13120 items. No doubt we have missed some, and data entry is of course a continuous process, but we hope our current coverage is sufficient for the tool to be useful.In a first stage the number of fields shown is rather limited: only the various editions, present and former whereabouts, writing surface, type, and date are listed. Even fewer fields (publication, inventory, material, and language) are searchable, so that the service currently provided is little more than a converter between inventory and publication numbers or a tool to find the most recent edition of a text. This will change in the months to come, when more fields will become available.DAHT has been created as part of the project Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in Graeco-Roman Egypt, sponsored by the Sofja Kovalevskaja Prize of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation awarded to me in 2004. Far from starting from scratch, however, the database builds upon two unpublished digital tools which were put at the project''s disposal. The first was a database with limited information about 1786 Demotic papyri, compiled by H.-J. Thissen (Universität zu Köln). The second was the nascent database (ca. 2000 entries) with more elaborate metadata of Demotic documentary texts (papyri, ostraca, and some other) which was one of the relational databases forming the digital version of the Prosopographia Ptolemaica (K.U.Leuven)..."