Project description
Bringing the hidden world of Coptic letter writing to light
Between the 4th and 11th centuries CE, Coptic letters captured the rhythms of everyday life in Egypt. The ERC-funded RSVP project sets out to reconstruct this rich world of scribal practice, tracing how people communicated, expressed identity, and maintained networks alongside Greek and Arabic. By analysing more than 5 000 letters with tools from palaeography, digital humanities, and sociolinguistics, the project will map dialects, code-switching, and evolving writing habits. It will also uncover how correspondence shaped social ties, authority and cultural change. By bringing these documents into focus, RSVP highlights overlooked voices, from villagers and local elites to women, revealing the concerns, routines, and identities of people living through a pivotal era in Egypt’s history.
Objective
RSVP aims at reassembling the rich world of scribal practices in Coptic letter writing between the 4th and 11th centuries CE. It offers an ambitious reconstruction of epistolographers’ habits, networks, and cultural identities when Coptic was the vernacular Egyptian language employed alongside official idioms (Greek and Arabic).
Using a multidisciplinary approach combining paleography, digital humanities, and sociolinguistic analysis, RSVP will analyze for the first time a corpus of over 5000 Coptic letters along four axes: 1) Challenge established views on vernacular practices through expanded Coptic letter analysis. 2) Investigate literacy, paleography, and writing practices in relation to cultural and linguistic shifts. 3) Identify dialectal variation and code switching through linguistic analysis, illuminating the period’s complex linguistic landscape. 4) Assess published Coptic letters’ impact on social cohesion and power dynamics on a diachronic and countrywide scale.
RSVP will contribute to papyrology, Coptology, and digital humanities, by reassessing writing culture, multilingualism, and epistolary étiquette, while applying digital approaches for large-scale analysis of ancient documents and open-linked data (e.g. OCR for semi-automatic text encoding and digital paleography for handwriting identification). Social historians of Antiquity and early medieval times will also have access to a nuanced understanding of cultural continuity and change during a crucial period of political and cultural transition between Byzantium and Islam, enhancing understanding of provincial life, local elites, villagers, and women’s roles.
By reconstructing letter-writing practices in Coptic, RSVP will refocus scholarship on overlooked historical sources, shedding new light on epistolographers’ daily matters, cultural identities, and social networks, while providing a view from below. It will amplify long-silenced and forgotten voices.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities languages and literature linguistics
- humanities history and archaeology history ancient history
- humanities philosophy, ethics and religion religions islam
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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69117 Heidelberg
Germany
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