Gazetteer of Papyri in British Collections

Available

 * http://gpbc.csad.ox.ac.uk/
 * Wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20160508210925/http://gpbc.csad.ox.ac.uk/

Project Staff

 * Dr. Willy Clarysse, Founder
 * Frédérique Landuyt, Researcher and collector of data
 * Jessica Ratcliff, Original database and website builder

Description
The Gazetteer of Papyri in the British Collections is a project that the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents (CSAD) undertook, between 1 October 2001 - 31 December 2004. It included a group of related projects which together constituted a programme entitled Script, Image and the Culture of Writing in the Ancient World, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

From the project website (accessed 2020-07-23):

The large-scale discovery and acquisition of Greek papyri in Egypt, by excavation and purchase, from the 1890s onwards resulted in the export of huge numbers of texts to Europe and North America. In the process archives of related texts from particular sites were dispersed and many remain fragmented and only partially published. It seems clear that a detailed reconstruction of the process of acquisition of papyri from Egypt by excavation and through the antiquities market would allow connections to be re-established between groups of texts that have become dispersed and lead to advances in our knowledge of the archaeology and documentation of Egypt.

To this end and following a pilot project undertaken by Dr. Willy Clarysse of the Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven (http://millennium.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/lhpc), the CSAD between 2002-2004 compiled a gazetteer, as complete as then practicable, of the source, content and location of papyrus collections in libraries, museums, universities and private ownership in Britain, describing holdings, provenance, circumstances of acquisition and archival elements.

The database service originally provided for the gazetteer data set is no longer (February 2017) available. While the database is being rewritten and updated, the gazetteer is offered here: http://gpbc.csad.ox.ac.uk/Gazetteer.xls as a downloadable Excel spreadsheet.

Database Description
From the project website (accessed 2020-07-23)

in libraries, museums, universities and private ownership in Britain.
 * A complete gazetteer of the source, content and location of papyrus collections

and archival elements.
 * Document records describe holdings, provenance, circumstances of acquisition