Everyday Writing in Graeco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt (I - VIII AD). A Socio-Semiotic Study of Communicative Variation

Project Information

EVWRIT

Grant agreement ID: 756487

DOI

10.3030/756487

Project closed

EC signature date 7 September 2017

Start date 1 June 2018

End date 31 May 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 476 250,00

EU contribution

€ 1 476 250,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - EVWRIT (Everyday Writing in Graeco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt (I - VIII AD). A Socio-Semiotic Study of Communicative Variation)

Reporting period: 2022-12-01 to 2024-05-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Writing in Classical antiquity is perhaps associated most with ‘canonical’ authors such as Homer, Plato and Sophocles. In the dry sands of Egypt, however, thousands of ‘everyday' (non-literary) documents have been preserved, mostly in Greek, ranging from very informal genres such as school texts and shopping lists to very formal ones, such as petitions and imperial edicts. Such documents have provided and continue to provide a key witness four our knowledge of the history, religion, economy, education, etc. of Ancient Egypt, and by extension the Ancient world. This project claims that these everyday documents have even more value: since they represent autographs – contrary to the manuscripts on which literary texts have been preserved – they can also inform us about communication practices in antiquity. In order to better understand the mechanisms of such communication practices, the project maps social contexts of writing on the one hand and variation in expression on the other, and tries to relate them. By doing so, the project aims to develop a more holistic perspective towards the 'meaning' of non-literary documents, and to extend the study of communication practices from the present day to antiquity, ultimately providing new insights about humans as social and communicative beings.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

To study communicative variation in antiquity, we have developed a new digital database designed to annotate everyday documents for both their socio-pragmatic background and communicative characteristics. This includes factors such as the social status of the initiator and receiver, the hierarchical nature of their relationship, and the communicative goals of the initiator. Additionally, our project goes beyond language to incorporate visual and material elements like format, layout, and handwriting, as well as orthography and language choice, which bridge the linguistic and visual domains.

Rather than attempting to annotate the entire papyrological corpus of approximately 60,000 texts, our project focuses on a 'focus corpus' of around 4,600 texts, which have been annotated for their socio-pragmatic background. The results of this annotation work will become publicly accessible through a dedicated project website, the 'Everyday Writing' website. Additionally, the 'Everyday Writing Data Exploration Tool' allows users to generate quantitative overviews based on our annotations.

The project has made significant progress in two major areas. The first is the analysis of meaning-making features within separate semiotic modes such as language, multilingualism, materiality, and typography. For example, various studies have appeared that outline how people combined clauses and sentences to create text, both with regard to subordination strategies (e.g. complementation, relativization, and adverbial subordination) and coordination strategies (e.g. discourse particles and asyndeton).

The second major area of progress is the analysis of inter-semiotic complementarity, which examines how different modes complement each other. To this end, we have studied textualization strategies in a corpus of women's letters and conducted comparative analyses of Greek and Arabic request letters in the Qurra dossier. These studies have enhanced our understanding of the interplay between linguistic and non-linguistic elements in ancient documents.

In addition, the project has explored novel methodological approaches to discussing communicative variation in documentary sources. This has led us to distinguish between the macro-sociological and quantitative approach of 'semiotic grammar' and the qualitatively oriented 'semiotic discourse analysis'. Rather than viewing these two approaches as completely distinct, they are best conceived as complementary, offering a holistic view of communicative variation.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

By developing new digital infrastructure to annotate documentary texts from a communicative perspective, by performing in-depth case studies of selected areas of communicative variation, and by discussing methodological angles to approach communicative variation from, the project has made significant progress beyond the state of the art.

In the nearby future, we intend to make the Everyday Writing website publicly available, as well as the database documentation and a short description of the main patterns that can be seen in the corpus.

We hope to establish a connection between the EVWRIT-website and already existing, complementary initiatives such as the Trismegistos portal and Marja Vierros’ Digital Grammar of Greek Documentary Papyri.

image of a papyrus

front cover of major publication