Trismegistos
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Trismegistos (also known as TM) called after the famous epithet of Hermes - Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom and writing who also played a major role in Greek religion and philosophy. is an interdisciplinary portal of papyrological and epigraphical resources, formerly Egypt and the Nile valley (800 BC-AD 800), now expanding to the Ancient World in general.[1] Described as arguably one of the most important databases for papyrological research.[2]
History
[edit]Trismegistos is the result of intense collaboration between the Universities of Leuven and Cologne.
It started in 2004 when Mark Depauw was granted a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung[3] to set up his own research team at a German university, in this case Cologne. The project wanted to investigate language shifts in relation to cultural identity, by setting up an online database of Graeco-Roman papyrological material in Egyptian scripts. Parallel to and in close cooperation with the existing tools of Greek papyrology. On the basis of this new platform, factors influencing language preferences would then be analyzed.
From late 2008 onwards, the focus of Trismegistos has been on people and places, but in 2010 the idea grew to expand Trismegistos further to include texts from outside Egypt. Since 2012 Trismegistos also includes unpublished texts for which information is available in online repositories.[4]
From January 2020: a subscription model was implemented, and many functionalities (including functional search in most categories) are available only for paying institutions. A fundraising campaign, Keep TM Alive, is in operation.[5]
References
[edit]- ^ Depauw, Mark; Gheldof, Tom (2014). "Trismegistos: An Interdisciplinary Platform for Ancient World Texts and Related Information". In Bolikowski, Łukasz; Casarosa, Vittore; Goodale, Paula; Houssos, Nikos; Manghi, Paolo; Schirrwagen, Jochen (eds.). Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries -- TPDL 2013 Selected Workshops. Communications in Computer and Information Science. Vol. 416. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp. 40–52. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-08425-1_5. ISBN 978-3-319-08425-1.
- ^ "Trismegistos : An Interdisciplinary Portal of the Ancient World | McMaster University Library". library.mcmaster.ca. Retrieved 2024-10-03.
- ^ https://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/7360.html
- ^ Trismegistos, About, History
- ^ Keep TM Alive!