Accounting for Life in Ptolemaic and Roman Thebes: Online Access to Ancient Archives

"The project is being undertaken by Foy Scalf, Oriental Institute Reserach Archivist, and Jacqueline Jay, Assistant Professor of History, Eastern Kentucky University.The Oriental Institute Museum houses a large collection of nearly 900 Demotic ostraca, pottery sherds upon which ancient scribes recorded a wide variety of text types. The vast majority of the corpus concerns economic matters and consists of receipts, contracts, memos, and lists, but there is a small selection of other genres such as votive and astrological texts. With few exceptions, the material derives from the environs of Thebes and over half of the collection derives from the Oriental Institute excavations at Medinet Habu. It is the project's aim to make available all of the Demotic ostraca in this collection, both published and unpublished, to scholars worldwide in a format that will allow for complex searching and sorting criteria as well as quick and easy updating. "