Papyrological conference in Barcelona (1-6 August, 2016)

papyregaliaAll four of us attended the 28th International Congress of Papyrology in Barcelona . Personally, I must admit that I had serious doubts concerning the prospects of the event. Due to expected tourist crowds and heat, as well as a previous chaotic conference experience in the same city years ago, I was less than anxious when packing my suitcase. But to be sure, I was eager to meet the papyrological community, as it was the first time ever for me in this conference.

Fortunately, all my fears turned out to be ill-founded. I’m sure there were tourist crowds somewhere, but they were not in the vicinity of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra where the conference was admirably hosted by Alberto Nodar and Sofía Torallas. It was warm, at places very warm for a northerner, but no unbearable heat at all, and there was a lovely breeze from the Mediterranean. The conference was very well organized, with an excellent venue, good program, strict timetables, and nice social events. Most importantly, I learned a thousand new things about papyri and papyrology. From a comparative perspective I might add that there were generally less comments after the papers than in some other conferences where I am used to going, but they were on the whole more pertinent. Everybody appeared to keep the discussion very tightly on the topic. Always a good thing!

Our metro station – well suited for papyrologists!

Our metro station – well suited for papyrologists!

On the whole, our team truly enjoyed the event, both scholarly as well as otherwise (including the sea and amazing beaches!). Some of us even went to see sights, such as the world-famous cathedral Sagrada Familia.

We all gave papers:

Martti introduced our project:  “Act of the Scribe: Transmitting Linguistic Knowledge and Scribal Practices in Graeco-Roman Antiquity”.

Marja presented the Sematia database, which she has created and developed: “Sematia platform, linguistic annotation and the katochoi of the Serapeion”. Prezi.

Sonja talked about some of the results of her Ph.D. project on Egyptian influence in Greek: “Evidence from the papyri: a preliminary definition of an Egyptian Greek variant in Graeco-Roman Antiquity”.

Hilla presented an unpublished Latin text:  “An unpublished Latin testament (P. Carlsberg 671 recto + P. Berlin 14470b recto)”. Handout. Slides.

Project team waiting for the congress farewell dinner

Project team waiting for the congress farewell dinner

From Oslo and in Oslo

Reception of DHN conference at the Oslo City Hall. Interesting murals were all over the place.

Reception of DHN conference at the Oslo City Hall. Interesting murals were all over the place.

This post belongs to the category ”better late than never”. In 8th of March, 2016, we were happy to host a guest lecture by Dr. Joanne Vera Stolk, who came to visit Helsinki from Oslo. Joanne defended her PhD thesis Case variation in Greek papyri. Retracing dative case syncretism in the language of the Greek documentary papyri and ostraca from Egypt (300 BCE – 800 CE) in late 2015 at Oslo University, so you can guess that we find her studies very relevant in our project.

If the standard is difficult to define, how could we define a mistake?

Joanne’s lecture was titled: ”How to use the dative case? Editorial regularizations in Greek documentary papyri.” She presented interesting examples on how an editor of a papyrus text may suggest that we should read, e.g., a dative instead of an accusative in one place, and another editor may suggest an opposite regularization in a similar place in a different text. Many such examples need of course careful analysis as respect to date and location, but they also offer interesting views on the fluctuating nature of ”standard” which the editors follow (or create). If half of the private letters from the fourth century use accusative in the health wishes and half use the dative, should we still consider the other one as ”standard”? All this is naturally highly important when one tries to trace so-called scribal mistakes. If the standard is difficult to define, how could we define a mistake? Therefore, the editorial regularizations are not to be taken at face value, but as signs of grammatical patterns where variation occurs and are thus worthy of further study. The disappearance of the dative case from Ancient Greek is par excellence one such development where fluctuation between dative and other cases need to be analyzed very carefully.

In the following week, it was our turn to visit Oslo. The Helsinki classicists were represented by Erik Henriksson and myself in the first meeting of the Nordic Association of Digital Humanities. I presented a poster on SEMATIA, and Erik, who is not officially part of our project but is a very-important-person for us, presented a poster on his PhD project on metrics in Late Greek poetry. Erik has helped me tremendously in building the Sematia tool, so it was very nice to have him there as well when presenting Sematia. The atmosphere in the DHN conference was very friendly and collegial, even though there were several overlapping sessions. (The programme can be found here.)

Marja ja posteri

Sematia poster at Nasjonalbiblioteket

The preconference workshop ”Digital Classics. A hands-on Introduction to EpiDoc and Treebanking” organized by Federico Aurora was especially rewarding for us. In the same evening we enjoyed a guest lecture by Gabriel Bodard (ICLS) on Digital Classics and the generous hospitality of the Classics department. On Friday I was invited to give a working paper at the papyrology seminar. Thanks to the small but spunky group of papyrologists at Oslo (Anastasia Maravela, Joanne, Federico et al.) for inviting me and listening my thoughts on copies and drafts in papyri after a night of suffering from fever and sore throat. All in all, great two weeks!

Oseberg ship at the Viking ship museum. Worth visiting!

Oseberg ship at the Viking ship museum. Worth visiting!