Tracking Papyrus and Parchment Paths. An Archaeological Atlas of Coptic Literature; Literary Texts in Their Geographical Context; Production, Copying, Usage, Dissemination and Storage (PAThs)

The purpose of “PAThs” is to offer an innovative approach to the study of the above-described evolution of Coptic literature and more specifically to the corpus of writings – almost exclusively of religious contents – produced in Egypt between the third and the end of the eleventh centuries, and expressed in the different dialects of the Coptic language. Its aim is therefore to provide a new perspective on the cultural landscape of Christian Egypt, by interweaving literary, codicological and archaeological data, and producing a series of scholarly tools, till now unavailable, in a digital environment, among which an atlas of late antique and early medieval Egypt: this will be searchable at different chronological, regional and thematic levels, and is intended to illustrate the strong interconnection between the intellectual and the material production on the one hand, and the area of provenance on the other. In this respect, Christian Egypt represents a unique opportunity, since no other Mediterranean region has yielded such a rich archaeological and bibliological documentation. This short article is just a brief presentation of the project and has been written when this still had to be concretely initiated.