Crossing Boundaries: Understanding Complex Scribal Practices in Ancient Egypt (with a 2019 Progress Report)

In this paper, we introduce the joint project of the Museo Egizio (Turin), the University of Basel, and the University of Liège entitled “Crossing Boundaries: Understanding Complex Scribal Practices in Ancient Egypt”, and provide a progress report for 2019. The project deals with Ramesside hieratic papyri of the Turin collection that stem from Deir el-Medina (c. 1350–1050 BCE), adopting a contextualised approach to this written material. Crossing the boundaries between disciplines, we aim to shed light on the life of a particular category of complex documents, labelled “heterogeneous” papyri, i.e., papyri combining on a single support texts (or drawings) belonging to different genres.


Introduction
Many aspects of ancient Egyptian scribal culture are still poorly understood. Earlier research mostly focused on the contents of texts in order to reconstruct literary compositions, explain historical events, or describe administrative and judicial customs. In trying to overcome traditional epistemological and methodological divides between disciplines such as archaeology, papyrology, palaeography, prosopography, and textual scholarship, the project "Crossing Boundaries" 1 adopts an interdisciplinary approach to written material. We are interested in the scribal practices of the individual agents who produced texts and in the life history of a particular category of complex documents, which we have labelled "heterogeneous"; papyri, that is, on each of which are assembled texts or drawings ascribable to different genres, such as accounts, poems, hymns and letters.
This category of papyri has never been studied as a coherent whole; rather, individual papyri have been used as convenient quarries for collecting additional witnesses of literary texts or specific pieces of information for thematic studies. They are, however, of primary importance for the study of the competence and performance of ancient scribes, both synchronically and diachronically.

Project description
In this section, we provide background information about contextualised approaches to writing in the community of Deir el-Medina ( §2.1.) and to the Ramesside papyrological material from the Museo Egizio ( §2.2.). This allows us to frame our research project on "heterogeneous" papyri ( §2.3.) more precisely, and to detail our research plan ( §2.4.).

Contextualised approaches to Egyptian scribal practices: The situation of Deir el-Medina
The quantity of written material coming from Deir el-Medina 3 is considerable for two main reasons: 4 on the one hand, the high level of literacy of the members of this community (who produced a significant amount of texts), 5 on the other hand, the exceptional state of preservation of the material itself.
The village is indeed located in foothills, protected from the Nile floods, and was abandoned sometime during the reign of Ramesses XI (c. 1100 BCE), when the community moved away, mainly because work in the royal necropolis had stopped and the desert was not a safe place at the time. 6 This unparalleled archaeological site was exposed to looting for centuries, but when Bernard Bruyère began its systematic excavation in 1917 for the French Institute for Oriental Archaeology in Cairo the sheer quantity of textual carriers (inter alia several thousand potsherds and limestone ostraca) prompted a partition of the material between two Egyptologists, Jaroslav Černý and Georges Posener. 7 The former was to publish the texts dealing with administration and daily life, the latter the ostraca with literary, magical, and religious compositions in the broader sense. Born out of practical necessities, this partition of the material quickly led to a disciplinary schism.
The administrative texts became the object of an independent branch of study, with foremost research centres like the universities of Leiden and Munich focusing on the economic, social and political history of the village and related prosopographical issues.
The literary texts, on the other hand, were mostly used for their content, i.e., they were often resorted to as mere sources providing additional witnesses for reconstructing the original literary composition. 8 Despite the fact that the same scribes were quite obviously behind these different texts and genres (not infrequently combined on the same papyrus), crossing the boundaries between the two realms became an exception.
As such, the main goal of the present project is to study scribal practices in "heterogeneous" documents ( §2.3.) that blur the frontiers between these two somewhat artificially created domains: the time has come for a contextualised and interdisciplinary approach to this material that considers the documents in their entirety, sees them in relation to their archaeological and social contexts, 9 and envisions the texts as productions of individual scribes to be interpreted both in relation to the other texts and drawings on the same document and to the larger intertextual environment. 10 Three main developments in the field support this research orientation. Firstly, research on administrative scribal practices in Deir el-Medina 11 has shown the vast potential of a contextualised approach to writing taking into account the archaeological data, the archival traditions, and the individual habits of scribes. 12 Secondly, a few studies have advocated an interdisciplinary view of the material left by the necropolis workmen -taking a scribe 13 or an archaeological site 14 as a point of departure -and offered an entirely new perspective on old research topics.
Finally, literary scholars 15 have shown the benefits of an interdisciplinary perspective integrating all dimensions of a document, from the very materiality of the text-bearing object 16 to the reconstructed situation of performance.

The Ramesside papyrological material from Deir el-Medina in the Museo Egizio
The Ramesside papyrological material in the Museo   in Deir el-Medina at the beginning of the twentieth century brought to light new papyri, which -based on joins that can be posited between them and those collected by Drovetti -confirm the latter's provenance. 17 The Museo Egizio holds what is undoubtedly the largest papyrus archive from pre-Hellenistic times. 18 The study of these papyri has been unflagging, 19 but has also proved challenging from both a quantitative -about 9,000 fragments of Ramesside papyri, among which some 300 larger ensembles have al- Some of the manuscripts are more or less complete, but numerous tiny hieratic fragments kept in folders belong either to these ensembles or to other unidentified texts. This material has been part of the museum collection for almost two centuries and is of significant historical importance, but has remained largely unpublished.

"Heterogeneous" papyri: Definition and examples
As stated above, the study object of the "Crossing Boundaries" project is the group of so-called "heterogeneous" papyri. This new label refers to a category of papyri combining texts and drawings of different types in a single manuscript. One can find, for example, a papyrus containing a copy of a letter to the authorities, a note about a judicial case, a hymn to a pharaoh, and a drawing to be copied on a coffin. Heterogeneous papyri should be carefully distinguished from another category, which is much better studied in Egyptological literature, the so-called miscellanies. 22

Research plan
The project's workflow can be described as encompassing five logical steps: (1) data collection and acquisition, (2) data documentation, (3) data connection, (4) data contextualisation, (5) data publication (Fig. 2, blue). For the sake of clarity, the central steps are mapped onto three conceptual elements of the Thot Data Model, 34 namely the Object, the Docu-ment, and the Witness (Fig. 2, dark grey). This general structure allows us to define five work packages (Fig. 2, light grey) and to map already available electronic tools and resources (Fig. 2, orange).

WP1: Restoration, digital acquisition and encoding of papyri in TPOP
The goal of WP1 is to make available in a digital

WP2: Virtual light table and learning algorithms
The aim of WP2 is to use state-of-the-art technology   Fig. 3 is such a fragment. On the recto are five lines of a punctuated text -belonging to the "miscellanies" genre -, while the verso preserves bits of two lines of an unidentified text.

WP3: Digital reconstruction of heterogeneous papyri
Note that the signs on the verso (and the interlinear space) are more than twice as big as the ones on the recto, and that the ductus is markedly different. As such, CP122/020 qualifies as a mixed fragment and two distinct witnesses can be posited for the recto and the verso.
Such fragments are the pieces of a puzzle, the final aim being to connect and/or join clusters of apparently disconnected fragments. A direct result of this WP will be the online publication of reconstructed documents.

WP4: Contextualising complex scribal practices
Switching from the reconstruction of documents to their detailed analysis, WP4 focuses on two complementary dimensions: the individual level of the scribes (studying the different hands on heterogeneous manuscripts and the related prosopographical information) and the diachronic use of these papyri (situating these sources within the broader context of archive keeping in Deir el-Medina).
The starting point for our study of the first dimension, that of individual scribes, will be letters. This text type will be studied by Kathrin Gabler (Basel) in the framework of her post-doctoral project. Letters from the Ramesside period contain a wealth of prosopographical information about their senders and recipients and, because they are used in a variety of contexts -from informal letters about daily businesses to models or copies of letters addressed to the authorities or the king -a great variety of hands can be distinguished. This allows us to for-mulate hypotheses about the paleographic repertoire of scribes and to attribute hands to individual scribes. As a second step, other text categories will be investigated: since we know that the same scribes produced other types of administrative and judicial texts and composed (or copied) literary, magical and religious works, a major challenge will be to identify regularities in terms of ductus, layout and variations in sign-shapes that can be interpreted as "markers" for certain scribes, and to track these regularities across texts and documents. 38 The second dimension to be studied will be the internal diachrony of the heterogeneous papyri, trying to unveil use patterns accounting for the layout and textual organisation of these documents. Preliminary studies 39 suggest that, even when papyri are used over a long period of time, thematic and social factors may explain the (seemingly random, or at least complex) distribution of texts and drawings.
An expected outcome of this study is to be able to situate the heterogeneous papyri of Turin within the broader context of scribal practices at Deir el-Medina, envisioning the recording of information on papyrus as a deeply embedded social process. 40 Do texts relative to work administration also appear on heterogeneous papyri, or is this practice limited to other text types, of a more private character? 41 Are we dealing with official "archives" of the necropolis administration or with private libraries, 42

WP5: Dissemination
The results of the project will be disseminated in traditional publication types such as books and papers. 44 Additionally, hundreds of fragments of papyrus will be encoded within the TPOP and published online as linked open data (with pictures, complete description, as well as a hieroglyphic transcription and a transliteration). The online material is connected to resources such as the Thesauri and On-

Progress report -2019
The project "Crossing Boundaries" officially began

Team and internal meetings
The recruitment procedure was conducted over

Ongoing work
During the first year of the project, the team mem-

Fragments: restoration and recording
The fragments are currently stored in cardboard folders that are numbered consecutively as CP1, CP2, etc. (CP = "Cartelline Papiri"). While processing the material, CP numbers are used as inventory numbers for the fragments that they contain: the undocumented fragments do not receive new inventory numbers, but sub-numbers based on the CP-numbers, e.g., CP058/001 or CP058/012. This allows the curatorial staff to keep track of the folder they originally come from. Before removing the fragments from a folder, the original situation is photographically documented. To date, approximately 304 entries of larger Ramesside manuscripts with inventory numbers have been recorded in the TPOP, along with more than 1200 out of 1500 restored CP fragments. The number of consolidated, restored and documented fragments is constantly growing. They will be visible at first only to project members and collaborators, but will be openly accessible online in TPOP from 2023 onward.   Automatic classification and matching of fragments, relying on modern machine-learning techniques (cf. WP2 in §2.4.2.), will eventually be implemented in the VLT framework. In this particular field of computer science, algorithms often try to learn from annotated structured data in order to infer classification rules and patterns. Subsequently, they make predictions about new, yet unseen data based on the rules they have learned before. The classification and reconstruction of papyri is a complex and challenging task in multiple ways: the material is very fragmented; the papyrus has a texture of its own, which interferes with its decoration and writing; the handwriting is often challenging to read; the script includes a high number of individual signs; etc. One of the most challenging issues is possibly the relative smallness of the set of training data, since machine learning processes usually process thousands of training images.  Table: (1) light table with fragments; (2) section to filter fragments;

The virtual light table and the learning algorithms
(3) list of fragments; (4) tray area showing loaded elements. Scans by Museo Egizio.
The very first step in the process is the segmentation of papyrus images, i.e., separating the fragments from the background and other objects within the image. In image segmentation -a special case of object detection -a classifier calculates object-class probabilities not just for whole images, but for each pixel within an image. These probabilities indicate to which class a pixel belongs -e.g., papyrus or background. The result is a binary mask (white: papyrus; black: background) which can be used to create an accurate cutout of the papyrus fragment. Fig. 7 shows the original image, the binary mask, and the cutout, obtained using an artificial neural network with a Unet architecture originally developed to segment cells in biomedical images. 47 These results will be further improved and serve as a basis for the next steps in analysing and classifying fragments.

Dissemination
In order to ensure the visibility of the project, we set up a web page for the project (http://crossing-boundaries.uliege.be). 48 In addition to basic information on the project (team, background, research questions, sub-projects), this website summarises past, current and planned activities 49 (presentations of the project, lectures, publications, and meetings), and the "News" page provides information about current developments (e.g., job opportunities, new

Impact
The project "Crossing Boundaries" is expected to have an impact on three main levels. First, from a cultural heritage point of view, it will lead to the restoration and reconstruction of a sizable quantity of ancient Egyptian papyri from fragments held in the Turin collection. These papyri will be available on-