Digital Classicist London & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2014
Friday July 11th at 16:30, in Room G37, Senate House, Malet Street,
London WC1E 7HU
*Silke Vanbeselaere (Leuven)*
Retracing Theban Witness Networks in Demotic Contracts
ALL WELCOME
This paper focuses on the presence of witnesses in Demotic contracts
during the Ptolemaic reign in Egypt. It will investigate the
interpersonal links between the three main actor groups of these
contracts: the scribes, the two contracting parties and the witnesses.
The first actors, i.e. the scribes, have been studied before and we saw
them connected through family ties, revealing the profession of a
contract scribe as a hereditary office associated with the Egyptian
temples. In the second century BC two operational notaries were attested
in Thebes: the notary of Amunrasonther and that of the prophets of
Djeme. But what about the period before that? Can we retrace these
notaries through network analysis or are we confronted with an
organisation entirely different from the one in the following century?
The contracting parties have always received a lot of attention from
papyrologists as well, as they were often the protagonists of important
archives. However, the third group of actors, the witnesses, have more
or less been neglected so far. I will try to provide an answer to the
crucial question of how these witnesses were chosen. Were they connected
to the notarial and scribal offices, or can they be linked to one or
both parties as family and/or acquaintances perhaps? Or were they chosen
randomly, passers-by simply picked from the streets when needed? The
online platform Trismegistos, which includes almost half a million
attestations of individuals in Greek and Egyptian texts between 800 BC
and AD 800, serves as a starting point for this research. Thanks to the
interlock structure of the text and reference databases, a two-mode
people-in-texts network can easily be extracted and converted into
one-mode people-to-people networks of the contracting parties, the
scribes and the witnesses.
Firstly, before we can start interpreting these networks, we need to
make sure that we have correctly identified the various actors appearing
in our network. The visualisation of the data has proven to be a very
useful new step in this process. Where before we were looking at the
actors' fathers and the characteristics of the relevant texts, we now
take the position of an actor in the – albeit preliminary – network into
account as an extra factor to obtain a faster and more advanced
identification.
Secondly, subjecting these networks to social network analysis will
contribute to our understanding of the relationships and interactions
between witnesses, scribes and contracting parties as well as the
functioning of the ancient notaries, not only in Thebes but in the whole
of Ptolemaic Egypt.
*The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.*
For more information please see the seminar website at
http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2014.html
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Dr. Stuart Dunn
Lecturer
Centre for e-Research, Department of Digital Humanities
King's College London
26-29 Drury Lane
London, WC2B 5RL
Email: [log in to unmask]
Tel. +44 (0)20 7848 2709
Fax. +44 (0)20 7848 2980
Blog: http://stuartdunn.wordpress.com
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