History of Papyrology |

About the Project

The History of Papyrology (HistPap) project is a digital edition of correspondence exchanged between papyrologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the discipline of papyrology was in its infancy. At present, it focuses mainly on letters written by B.P. Grenfell (1869-1926), who was the founder of British papyrology with A.S. Hunt (1871-1934), but coverage will expand in the future.

University of California, Berkeley, professor Todd Hickeyhas long had an interest in the history of papyrology. He has searched for archival materials illuminating the origins of the discipline in American and European archives and has published extensively on the topic (see, e.g., BASP 54 (2017) and Hickey-Keenan 2021. HistPap builds upon Professor Hickey’s earlier work, and as a collaborative digital project it expands the scope and reach of this research.

Many of the private letters published in HistPap are essential reading not only for papyrologists but also for anyone interested in the history of classical studies and Egyptology more generally. They complement, supplement, or correct information presented in “official” sources (e.g., archaeological reports, scholarly or popular press articles, etc.) and are often revealing in a way that other sources cannot be. The competitive and nationalistic nature of scholarly work in Egypt at the time surfaces through the letters, as do practices that, though widely accepted at the time, are ethically questionable today. It is not HistPap’s aim to pass judgment on the letters and their contents, but we expect that they will foster the ethical discussions currently taking place in our disciplines (see, e.g., here and here).

The Team

The History of Papyrology website began in 2022 as The Smyly Correspondence Project Online, a thesis project created by Sarah Tew in the Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge master’s program at the University of Bologna, Italy under the sponsorship of Dr. Giulio Iovine, who was, at the time, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri (CTP) at the University of California, Berkeley. Tew, now Curator of Rare Books at the University of Florida, continues to lead the technical development for the project.

In September 2023, the team expanded to include Dr. Giuliano Sidro, then postdoctoral scholar at the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri, and undergraduates Maddie Qualls and Millie You, who worked on the project through UC Berkeley’s Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP) at the Center.

Editorial Guidelines

Transcriptions are documentary. Handwritten text is rendered in Times New Roman while the printed text of printed letterheads and postcard headings is rendered in Arial.

The layout of the documents is only partially rendered. Major features of correspondence, such as datelines, signatures, and postscripts have been formatted accordingly.

Indents and whitespace have only been preserved in handwritten tables in ancient Greek where their layout significantly impacts the meaning and readability of the information.

Postmarks and stamps have not been rendered on the webpage but are described in the XML headers.

Named entities have been hyperlinked to their Wikidata pages and are rendered in blue. Commentary from Dr. Todd Hickey accompanies each document, often complemented by additions from subsequent readers (J.G. Keenan, G. Sidro), accompanies each document.

Transcription

Tew manually transcribed and partially encoded the Trinity College Dublin documents from B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt to J.G. Smyly using Transkribus. XML transcriptions with TEI-encoding were exported from Transkribus and further processed in Oxygen XML Editor.

Sidro, Qualls, and You joined the team in Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 semesters and took over the transcription work. They updated the manual transcriptions done by Tew, added more robust headers, TEI-encoded the texts for named entities, structural features, and visual features to be rendered on the website, added pointers to link to the commentary by Hickey. They also created HTML note files for letters 77 to 106 based on corrections and annotations from Hickey.

In Spring 2025 they began work to ingest a new collection of letters, from B.P. Grenfell and mostly to P.A. Hearst or B.I. Wheeler held at UC Berkeley’s The Bancroft Library. This time, they used a model we developed in Transkribus to create preliminary transcriptions and then manually reviewed, corrected and encoding each document. For details on the model, please see the Digital Humanities section below.

In Summer 2025, Maddie Qualls updated the Trinity College Dublin transcriptions and notes based on corrections and additional commentary from Dr. James Keenan (Loyola University Chicago). In Summer 2026, additional proofreading, feedback, and commentary from Flavio Santini (UC Berkeley, AHMA) informed a redesign of the website; Millie You incorporated Santini’s corrections into the transcriptions and notes.

All transcriptions are available at the History of Papyrology Public GitHub Repository.

Encoding

All documents have been encoded according to the TEI P5 guidelines. Structural components encoded include: pages, paragraphs, post-scripts, letterheads, signature lines and datelines. Structural feature encoding was completed through a combination of manual encoding by Tew, Sidro, Qualls, and You and built-in TEI encoding features in Transkribus.

Strikethroughs, deletions, and additions were manually encoded and are rendered in the digital edition by Tew, Sidro, Qualls, and You.

Named people, places, organizations, and published or written and artistic works were manually encoded by Tew, Sidro, Qualls, and You.

Commentary

Hickey provided most of the commentary with review and additions by Sidro, Keenan, and Santini.

Tew, Sidro, Qualls, and You transferred Hickey’s commentary from PDFs to HTML note files manually.

Images

The high resolution images of the documents were supplied by the holding collections.

Trinity College, Dublin, the University of Dublin and the University of California Bancroft Library provided high-resolution TIFFs of documents in their collection.

The Bancroft Library’s images are also available through UC Berkeley Library Digital Collections.

Images from Trinity College, Dublin, the University of Dublin are not available online. Click here for the catalog record.

Tew used LibVips to create deep-zoom image files and OpenSeadragon to create the viewer on the website.

Website Creation

History of Papyrology is a static website generated with Hugo and hosted by Hickey through Dreamhosters.

To create this website, Tew transformed the XML transcriptions through an XSLT stylesheet in Oxygen into Markdown and HTML files.

>

Tew and You wrote templates for each webpage and then used Hugo to compile all of the files into the website you are now viewing.

In the summer of 2025, Tew and You ingested UC Berkeley’s collection of letters that the team transcribed and tagged during the spring of 2025.

In the following semester, the team focused on improving the usability of the website, working on interface design to improve the information structure and navigation.

The team conducted a survey of existing digital archives, and You updated the HTML and CSS to incorporate the new designs, including this About page.

Digital Humanities Projects

In the fall semester of 2024, with the Trinity College, Dublin correspondence fully on the website, the team turned to digital humanities experiments with the transcriptions and named-entity data from the corpus. Tew organized Zoom-based workshops on text-recognition models in Transkribus, text analysis in AntConc and Voyant, and network analysis in Gephi.

In Transkribus, Qualls, You and Sidro trained multiple models with various groups and amounts of materials from the TCD collection. After some trials with this, the best model was Grenfell 1 with a character error rate of 14.81%. This model was trained on documents 50–99, which consist of mostly letters containing only handwritten material with the addition of three postcards and three letters with printed letterheads. We also tested out one of Trankribus’ Super Models, The Text Titan I, which is a large language model trained on handwritten material in multiple European languages, including English. After some qualitative assessment, the trained model Grenfell 1 appeared to perform better than The Text Titan I. Although its CER was higher than the target percentage of 8%, it still proved to be a useful tool for later developments and future transcriptions.

After the network analysis workshop, Qualls was inspired to investigate the nature of Grenfell’s relationships with the people he writes about. Initially, she sorted the named people into one of five categories: professional (45.95%), personal (4.05%), both (8.11%), none (32.43%), or unknown (9.46%). This classification is subjective and involves a lot of gray area, but she established criteria to identify each person. After labeling each person, she imported this data as a CSV file into Gephi to create a visualization and statistical analysis. This analysis revealed that the majority are professional relations as Grenfell’s letters to Smyly are mostly about professional and scholarly topics. This is followed by the “none” category because of how frequently he writes about the ancient figures as they relate to his papyrological work. As for the both professional and personal relations, while they only make up about 8% of those mentioned by Grenfell, they are given more weight by the fact that they are some of the most mentioned individuals – visualized by the size of their nodes in the Gephi visualization. While this is solely a reflection of how the documents reference the people, rather than the actual reality of the relationships between Grenfell and these individuals, this analysis can help us better understand the nature of correspondence between Grenfell and Smyly.

You investigated the letters through conducting text analysis in Voyant. The analysis revealed that Grenfell's letters to Smyly maintained a professional and respectful tone. Expectations are often addressed, and often expressed in an authoritative manner. The letters also included frequent requests for visits, and consistently provided reports of updates and ongoing progress. Overall, the letters contain a balanced mix of expectations, instructions, and updates.

In January, our team presented the results of our digital humanities research at the Ancient MakerSpaces session of the 2025 Society for Classical Studies meeting in Philadelphia.

UCB Collection

During the spring 2025 semester, the team began to ingest a new batch of correspondence, consisting of 14 letters from the George and Phoebe Apperson Hearst papers and UC Berkeley’s University Archives, both kept at The Bancroft Library. The letters are from B.P Grenfell to multiple recipients, mostly Phoebe A. Hearst and Benjamin I. Wheeler, and concern the publication of the Tebtunis Papyri volumes.

To begin, the team imaged the letters to upload into Transkribus and performed and edited layout analysis on each letter to prepare them for transcription.

Then, the team used the text-recognition model to create preliminary transcripts in Transkribus, which were then manually edited and encoded.

From there, the process was much the same as with the TCD documents: export as XML from Transkribus; edit encoding in Oxygen; correct transcription and create HTML note files based on Hickey’s review.

Future of the Project

In the immediate future, the team plans to continue to expand the scope of the project by processing correspondence by Grenfell and other papyrologists from more collections. Selection criteria may expand to non-English documents and other formats, including diaries.

Other areas of future developments include website design and features, deeper integration with WikiData, and expanded data formats.

Software List

Transcriptions: Transkribus
Images: LibVips
Image Viewer: OpenSeadragon
Static Site Generator: Hugo
Text Editing: Oxygen XML Editor
Web Hosting: DreamHost
File Management: GitHub

Biography of J.Gilbart Smyly

By Dr. Brian McGing, Emeritus Professor of Greek, Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin

As originally published in "Smyly, Josiah Gilbart (1867-1948)." In The Dictionary of British Classicists. Volume 3, O-Z, by Robert B. Todd, 907. Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004. doi:10.1017/S0009840X05001241.

SMYLY, Josiah Gilbart (1867-1948)

Gilbart Smyly was born in Dublin on 10 July 1867 and died there on Christmas Day 1948. He was the second son of Sir Philip Crampton Smyly, a distinguished Dublin surgeon, of a family settled in Ireland since the sixteenth century. His elder brother became Chief Justice of Sierra Leone. He was educated at Charterhouse before entering Trinity College Dublin in 1885. He won a classical scholarship pin 1887 and graduated in 1889 with a senior moderatorship in mathematics, an unusual combination of subjects. He was elected to a fellowship of Trinity on his fifth attempt in 1897, appointed professor of Latin in 1904, and Regius Professor of Greek in 1915. He resigned the Greek Chair in 19227, when he became a senior fellow, but retained the librarianship from 1914 until his death. He never married.

Smyly is mostly remembered in Trinity College for his long, but unusually negligent, administration of the Library. Although McDowell and Webb (p. 400) concede that ‘of the eighteen fellows who were elected from 1896 to 1915 Smyly and A.A. Luce alone produced original work of any substance and distinction’, Smyly’s academic qualities deserve greater recognition than they have received, as he was a Greek papyrologist of exceptional ability and international reputation – a much better papyrologist, in fact, than his more famous colleague, J.P. Mahaffy. Letters from many of the leading European scholars of the day attest the high regard in which his expertise was held, particularly in the reading of difficult texts. He collaborated with his friends Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt in the publication of the first volume of The Tebtunis Papyri (1902), and, as C.C. Edgar notes in the Introduction to the second part of volume 3 (1938), his ‘first transcripts laid the foundation for the whole of volume 3’. His most important publication was the third volume of The Flinders Petrie Papyri (1905), edited ostensibly in collaboration with Mahaffy, but in reality very largely by Smyly himself. *Greek Papyri from Gurob* (1921) – praised as an unusually interesting publication by U. Wilcken (unpublished letter in the Smyly Papers at Trinity College) – also showed his talents to good effect, as did a steady flow of articles on papyrological and other matters. In later years he transcribed many medieval manuscripts in the Library of Trinnity, one of which he published as a book: Daniel of Beccles: Urbanus magnus Danielis Becclesiensis (1939).

Smyly’s close friendship with Grenfell and Hunt placed him very much at the centre of the papyrological world in its early days, and gave him access to some of the most important material emerging from Egypt. There were few scholars who could read Greek papyri as well as he did, and in retrospect it is disappointing that he did not publish more. But he was a strange and reclusive person (‘one of the least sociable of the Senior Fellows’, according to W.B. Stanford), whose contribution to the development of papyrology, as one of its most expert and respected early practitioners, should not be underestimated.

Bibliography

(with B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt), The Tebtunis Papyri, vol. 1 (1902) (with A.S. Hunt), vol. 3, pt 1 (1933); (with A.S. Hunt and C.C. Edgar), vol. 3, pt 2 (1938). (with J.P. Mahaffy), The Flinders Petrie Papyri, vol. 3 (1905). Greek Papyri from Gurob (1921). Daniel of Beccles: Urbanus magnus Danielis Becclesiensis (1939).

Thank yous

Sincerest thanks to:

Trinity College, Dublin, Board of Trustees
University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library
Center for the Tebtunis Papyri
Flavio Santini, UC Berkeley, AHMA
James Keenan, Loyola University, Chicago
Brian McGing, Trinity College, Dublin
Giulio Iovine, University of Bologna