Nominator's project description
| About three hundred years before Christ, a number of indigenous languages existed alongside each other in Egypt, such as Demotic and the language of the Greek conquerors. Thousands of texts on pottery shards or papyrus, which have been preserved by the dry climate to this day, bear witness to a wealth of multilingual and multicultural diversity. Modern papyrology is thus faced with a language problem. Most researchers in this field are Graecists. For them, Demotic sources are literally a closed book. The far smaller group of Egyptologists, on the other hand, can in the best case understand the Demotic texts but often not the Greek. Thus, depending on the discipline, the picture only reveals one half of multicultural Egypt at the time - usually the Greek half. The two research disciplines are drifting further apart; the contribution of Egyptian culture is in danger of being overlooked. This is the reason why Mark Depauw wants to document the sources in Egyptian languages in a data-base and thus create a partner project for the data-bases currently emerging for Greek sources, making cooperation between the two disciplines feasible. In this way, it will be easier to understand both how the language developed and what influence cultural and ethnic factors had on it. |
