From ancient production and use to modern reconstruction and recording. Deir el-Medina as a methodological laboratory for the analysis of text objects

The goal of this lecture is to use the scribal environment of Deir el-Medina (Egypt), namely the village of highly literate workmen who built and decorated the royal tombs in the Theban necropolis during the New Kingdom (c. 1350–1000 BCE), as a laboratory for showcasing and discussing recent methodological advances in studying and documenting text objects from the ancient world. Based on a series of case-studies, the first part of the lecture will be devoted to the analysis of the actual manufacture and use of ostraca and papyri in this community. In a second step, I will introduce the “Thot Data Model” and explain how it has been implemented within the Turin Papyrus Online Platform for documenting the materiality of a collection of papyri stored at the Museo Egizio (Turin), which originates precisely from Deir el-Medina. Finally, I will introduce the “Virtual Light Table”, a software tool that has been developed by Stephan Unter in the framework of the “Crossing Boundaries” project for supporting the virtual reconstruction of fragmentary written material.