Iliad case study
The Iliad papyri are an obvious case study to begin with: the content of Homer's Iliad is well established, the corpus is numerous (around 1,500 extant fragments with Iliad texts on them) and spanned over the entire papyrological millennium, i.e. from the 3rd century BC to the 7th century AD. This corpus is therefore representative of the chronological evolution of Greek scripts, but also of their various utilizations, from school exercises to expensive calligraphic books. The first goal of this case study will be to find as many joins as possible among the 1,500 already known pieces and to provide an efficient online tool for future editions. The second result will be a chronological classification of these fragments, starting with those that can be confidently dated, with objective criteria on the evolution of the Greek script through the papyrological millennium.
From the Iliad papyri was selected a dataset for the Competition on Document Image Binarization (DIBCO 2019) as part of ICDAR 2019, see DIBCO 2019 Papyri Dataset.
Worldwide public reading of the Iliad
D-scribes took part in the International public reading of the Iliad on March 22nd, 2019, from 10-11 a.m. In the Rathaus (town hall), we read aloud our favourite passages of Iliad, among them the texts which are preserved on the two papyrus fragments belonging to the University’s collection. Watch the videos here.
Here you can virtually visit the exhibition Homer, Ilias und Basel which we hosted in order to show the Iliad papyri to the general public, and to inform about the research projects going on in Basel. Take a look here.