Excellent research and papyri

Posted on 9 October 2008

Today, a new research centre, Canon and Identity Formation in the Earliest Literate Societies, opens at the Department of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies (ToRS). The Centre is founded through a donation of DKK 15.500.000 from the University of Copenhagen’s Excellence Programmes.

The new centre is to examine central aspects of the intellectual history of mankind by discovering and analysing new knowledge about the ancient history of the Middle East. The researchers are, among other things, going to dive into a comprehensive collection of texts from a looted temple library – the so-called Papyrus Carlsberg Collection, which is kept at ToRS. The papyri collection is the largest of its kind in the world and it includes tens of thousands of papyri fragments from around 4-500 papyri texts. The texts have been written in hieratic and demotic, which are the sacred and the common written languages of the Egyptians from the centuries before our time.

Head of Centre and Egyptologist Kim Ryholt, who is one of the few people in the world that can read demotic texts, has spent a couple of years working on organising the comprehensive fragmented material of the papyri collection. The new centre will provide the resources to examine the texts closer and, for instance, find out how the world’s first libraries were established and organised, and how social and ethnic identity were defined in the written texts.

The Excellence Programmes

To further basic research, the University of Copenhagen has set up a Programme of Excellence through which researchers have been able to apply for up to DK five million annually for up to five years for research projects in existing or new scientific areas.

Read more about the Excellence Programme