What’s wrong? Ancient corrections in Greek papyri from Egypt

Introduction

This project aims to transform the study of the Ancient Greek language by shifting the focus away from famous literary authors towards the language as it was produced in everyday life. The large corpus of 60,000 Greek texts written on papyrus between 300 BCE and 800 CE provides an important source for our knowledge of the ancient world and offers an excellent opportunity to study the Greek language as written by non-scholarly writers in antiquity.

Objectives

In order to really change our views of what ‘correct’ Ancient Greek should look like, we need to take a different perspective: the perspective of the ancient writer. What did the writers perceive as a mistake? How did they compose their texts? In order to answer these questions, this project employs an innovative resource: the corrections made by the ancient writers themselves.

A multidisciplinary team of three researchers and a student assistant will analyze scribal corrections at different levels of language production (from spelling and morphology to semantics and phraseology) across a range of different genres (contracts, petitions, letters, and lists) with the following three key objectives:

1. To create an annotated open-access relational database of ancient corrections in Greek papyri.
2. To study the production of Greek spelling from below, as corrected by the ancient writers themselves, comparatively in different genres, written by writers from diverse backgrounds.
3. To identify the stage of composition of a textual object and make this category an integrated part of the analysis of historical textual artifacts, such as papyrus documents.

Impact

This will give us a unique perspective on the Greek language and allow us for the first time to study what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the Postclassical Greek language in daily practice. The outcomes of this project will change how we perceive non-scholarly writers and thereby contribute to a new and more inclusive perspective on ancient societies.