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

Informations projet

EVWRIT

N° de convention de subvention: 756487

DOI

10.3030/756487

Projet clôturé

Date de signature de la CE 7 Septembre 2017

Date de début 1 Juin 2018

Date de fin 31 Mai 2024

Financé au titre de

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Coût total

€ 1 476 250,00

Contribution de l’UE

€ 1 476 250,00

Coordonné par

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)

Période du rapport: 2022-12-01 au 2024-05-31

Résumé du contexte et des objectifs généraux du projet

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.

Travail effectué depuis le début du projet jusqu’à la fin de la période considérée dans le rapport et principaux résultats atteints jusqu’à présent

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.

Progrès au-delà de l’état des connaissances et impact potentiel prévu (y compris l’impact socio-économique et les conséquences sociétales plus larges du projet jusqu’à présent)

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