[PAPY] new Trismegistos features

[Mark Depauw]

Dear PAPY-list members,

In the past few months we have added some new features to Trismegistos, to which we would like to draw your attention.

New is the Places database, which contains all toponyms, both modern and ancient, which have been mentioned as provenance for TM-texts. We have tried to include as many alternative writings as possible, but certainly for Arabic place names we have only the most common versions of the English equivalent. It is best to use 'Quicksearch' which automatically looks amongst all these variants.
The Places database is linked with the K.U.Leuven Fayum database, which is now back online and provides a detailed analysis for many Fayum villages.
 
To find texts with a specific provenance you can now also start from the three Trismegistos Places maps we have created in Google. The coordinates of these places are those of the Topographical Atlas of Baines and Malek, which provides degrees and minutes, but no seconds. If you zoom in too closely, the location may become somewhat imprecise.
 
Similar Trismegistos Collections maps (nine in all) are now also available. Here the location is very precise in most cases (red pointers), so that it becomes possible to ask Google maps for direction on how to get there. We would be happy to get information about those collections (orange pointers) for which we have not found a precise location.
 
In the Texts database we have added new search possibilities in the form of lookups for publication sigla and for nome/region, and it is now also possible to search for date ranges, e.g. all texts between 214 and 211 BC. Other, smaller new features include using the back-button on your browser to bring you back to the search criteria you had entered, or the possibility to combine two searches using 'BUT NOT'.
 
All these new features are also available in TM-partner projects who work in the shared Filemaker database, such as DAHT (Demotic and Abnormal Hieratic Texts), LDAB (Leuven Database of Ancient Books), HHP (Hieroglyphic and Hieratic Papyri), ATE (Aramaic Texts from Egypt), and our latest spin-off TM-Magic (F. Naether, Leipzig / Köln), which allows searches across language or script for all religious, ritual, magic and divinatory texts.
 
We hope that these new databases and technical improvements will prove useful. We will continue to enhance search facilities, but please let us know any desiderata, remarks, ... you might have  and we will try to accommodate them in the future.
 
All the best,
 
for Trismegistos
Mark Depauw

Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in Graeco-Roman Egypt (Cologne)
in collaboration with the K.U.Leuven, Ancient History


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