UNIverse - Public Research Portal
Project cover

EGRAPSA: Retracing the evolutions of handwritings in Greco-Roman Egypt thanks to digital palaeography

Research Project
 | 
01.05.2023
 - 30.04.2028

Papyri preserved by the dry climate of Egypt are an unparalleled source of information on the Ancient World. Around 80,000 papyri written in ancient Greek have already been published, covering a millennium between the time of Alexander the Great and the Arab conquest of Egypt (end of 4th c. BCE to early 8th c. CE). However, their large number, their diversity and their current dispersion have impeded a comprehensive grasp of their nature and content. In particular, palaeography, as the study of handwritings that has the potential to unveil who, where and when a text has been written, still relies on experts' assertions which rarely reach consensus. New technological advances in Computer Science allow now building the big picture of the writing culture of Greco-Roman Egypt and developing scientific analyses of scripts. The goal of EGRAPSA project (literally "I have written" in Ancient Greek) is to provide a new theoretical framework to the palaeography of Greek papyri. Starting from sound evidence, it aims at retracing the evolutions of handwritings, generating a model that, in turn, can contribute at organizing the papyrological documentation in a coherent panorama, improving the solidity of dates and writer identifications made on palaeographical grounds. The ground-breaking dimension of the project is not only in its scope that encompasses the entire papyrological documentation in its complexity, and in its conceptual approach to make sense of the plurality of scripts by discerning evolution phenomena but also in its methodological choice to measure similarities and explain evolutions by focusing on the reconstruction of the dynamics of writing, thus to literally re-trace handwritings.

Funding

EGRAPSA: Retracing the evolutions of handwritings in Greco-Roman Egypt thanks to digital palaeography

SNF Starting Grants (GrantsTool), 01.2023-12.2027 (60)
PI : Marthot-Santaniello, Isabelle.

Publications

Ferretti, L. et al. (2025) ‘Hell-Date. EGRAPSA Hellenistic Dated Papyri Dataset’. Available at: https://doi.org/https://zenodo.org/records/15083589.

URLs
URLs

Cherix, R. et al. (2025) ‘Touching history: Designing digital papyrus interactions through physical interface’, in Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, TEI 2025. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, Inc (Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, TEI 2025), pp. 1–3. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3689050.3708334.

URLs
URLs

Ferretti, Lavinia (2025) ‘Compte-rendu de: Giuditta Mirizio: Amministrare e comunicare nell’Egitto tolemaico. La funzione delle copie (antigrapha) nella documentazione papirologica, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2021’, Sehepunkte. 15.09.2025.

URLs
URLs

Peer, Marco et al. (2025) ‘KaiRacters: Character-Level-Based Writer Retrieval for Greek Papyri’, in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) . Cham: Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH (Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) ), pp. 73–88. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78495-8_5.

URLs
URLs

Marthot-Santaniello, I. and Serbaeva, O. (2024) ‘Digital palaeography of Iliad papyri, D-scribes project and the Research Environment for Ancient Documents (READ) platform’, in Digital Papyrology III: The Digital Critical Edition of Greek Papyri: Issues, Projects, and Perspectives. De Gruyter (Digital Papyrology III: The Digital Critical Edition of Greek Papyri: Issues, Projects, and Perspectives), pp. 327–346. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111070162-019.

URLs
URLs

De Gregorio, Giuseppe et al. (2024) ‘A New Framework for Error Analysis in Computational Paleographic Dating of Greek Papyri’, in Goos, Gerhard (ed.) ICDAR: International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition. Athens, Greece: Springer Nature Switzerland (Lecture Notes in Computer Science ), pp. 102–118. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-70642-4_7.

URLs
URLs

Pavlopoulos, John et al. (2024) ‘Explainable dating of greek papyri images’, Machine Learning, 113(9), pp. 6765–6786. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10994-024-06589-w.

URLs
URLs

Ferretti, Lavinia (2024) ‘P.Ross.Georg. 2 13 and Other Corrections to Published Papyri’, Pylon. 11.07.2024, 5. Available at: https://doi.org/10.48631/PYLON.2024.5.105734.

URLs
URLs

Cilia, Nicole Dalia et al. (2024) ‘A Novel Writer Identification Approach for Greek Papyri Images’, in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH (Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)), pp. 422–436. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51026-7_36.

URLs
URLs

De Gregorio, G. et al. (2024) ‘NeuroPapyri: A Deep Attention Embedding Network for Handwritten Papyri Retrieval’, in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). Cham: Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH (Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)), pp. 71–86. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-70642-4_5.

URLs
URLs

Members (4)

MALE avatar

Giuseppe De Gregorio

Post-doc collaborator
Profile Photo

Lavinia Ferretti

Post-doc collaborator
Profile Photo

Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello

Principal Investigator
FEMALE avatar

Olga Serbaeva Saraogi

Technical assistant