Homeric Papyri Service Online

Homer and the Papyri, was first created by Professor Dana Sutton of the University of California, Irvine, to be a database of fragments of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey that survive on papyrus from Graeco-Roman Egypt.

The Center for Hellenic Studies inherited this valuable data, and the project is now under the editorship of Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott, as part of the ongoing Homer Multitext project.

We are pleased to announce the first publication of a new service for scholars and readers interested in Homeric papyri: The Homeric Papyri Canonical Text Service. This is an application hosted on Google AppEngine. While the service is intended primarily to allow other online applications to discover and retrieve texts and passages of text, it does provide a human-readable interface to these papyri.

The texts as delivered by this service include full editorial markup, in TEI-P5-compliant XML. The human-readable form (visible by default) intentionally hides any text that is not physically present on the papyrus. Future versions of the user-interface to this service may give the option to show or hide editorially supplied text at the user’s discretion.

For more information on the Canonical Text Services Protocol (“CTS”), see the project’s Sourceforge site.

— Christopher W. Blackwell