ANN ARBOR—Modern information technology has spurred substantial new interest in one of the most ancient of communications media: papyrus. APIS, a “virtual library” of papyrological collections at http://www.lib.umich.edu/pap/ gets more than 100,000 hits a month, increasingly from non-specialists. The University of Michigan, as the lead institution on APIS (Advanced Papyrological Information System) since 2000, recently received a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to assure the continuation and expansion of the project, which was begun in 1996. It followed on the success of a digitization project by U-M from 1991 to 1995 to make its collection available on the Web. APIS makes it possible for viewers to explore digital images of ancient papyrus and examine detailed library catalog records about the material. The APIS database contains more than 20,000 records, about 3,400 of them from the U-M collection. “APIS has two main goals,” says Traianos Gagos, U-M associate professor of Greek and Papyrology and president of the American Society of Papyrologists. “The first is to transform instruction and research in papyrology, and the second is to make papyrological material readily accessible to non-specialists. The latter, in fact, is becoming its most central outcome.” Papyrology is the study of ancient Egyptian texts written in ink on a variety of surfaces, including pieces of broken pots, wooden and wax tablets, parchment, lead and fabric, but primarily on papyrus. Though papyri have been found in Italy, Palestine, Syria, Israel, Greece and Jordan, the bulk of the papyri in various collections around the world comes from Egypt where it survived in the ruins and trash piles of ancient towns. Individual institutions, as forerunners of APIS, attracted great interest from schools and the general public, says Gagos. But the APIS system makes the papyrological materials more user-friendly. While skilled papyrologists continue to use the APIS collections, Gagos says there has been a tremendous new interest from a wide spectrum of historians in using APIS data for their research. “Teachers and instructors at all levels of education use our sites,” Gagos says. “Very often they send us feedback through e-mail. More often they visit our collections with their students to view the original manuscripts.” The interest sparked by the APIS and U-M online presentations results in many more visits to the collection, Gagos said. He noted that U-M now gives tours of its papyrus collection to a combined audience of about 2,000 students and members of the general public each year. “In the era before the Internet,” Gagos says, “we had to reach out to let people know what we have in our collection. Now people find us out on their own. APIS gets more than 100,000 hits a month.” With more than 10,000 individual papyrus fragments, U-M is home to one of the largest collections of papyri in the world. The collection’s home page at http://www.lib.umich.edu/pap/ provides the public access to U-M’s collection as well as to many other papyrological resources, including APIS. Using the U-M papyrology collection, William A. Johnson of the University of Cincinnati has mounted a web site that offers the visitor the sounds of ancient instrumental music as transcribed from the U-M collection. Visit http://www.lib.umich.edu/pap/ and look under “What’s New.” Papyrus documents provide a unique insight into the ancient world revealing the social structure of ancient life in general and in detail. Such documents add to the understanding of the history of Egypt under Greek and Roman rule, the structure of the society from the Ptolemaic to the Byzantine period, the administration, the personal religious beliefs of individuals, the official religions and their dogmatic clashes, the history of ancient scholarship, the schools, higher education and changes in literary taste over the periods. About 70 percent of the total papyrus collections in North America have been cataloged, scanned and entered into APIS. The remaining 30 percent is largely from the collection at U-M and Berkeley, which have the largest collections in the U.S., Gagos said.

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U-M Papyrus Collection