Introduction
Sacri lapides Aegypti: from the scribes of temples to the copyists of scriptoria. The transformation of spaces of cult, identity and memory from pharaonic and Graeco-Roman Egypt to Christian Egypt (SLA https://paths-erc.eu/sacri-lapides-aegypti/) is a FARE MIUR project hosted at Sapienza University of Rome by the Department of History, Anthropology, Religions, Performing Arts (SARAS) and directed by Paola Buzi, full professor of Egyptology and Coptic Civilization at the same University and director of the DigiLab Sapienza research centre. SLA was launched in 2017 as a direct continuation of the 2015 ERC Advanced project PAThs: Tracking Papyrus and Parchment Paths: An Archaeological Atlas of Coptic Literature, of which it aims to be an in-depth study from an archaeological point of view. Indeed, to summarize, while the goal of PAThs is to study the geography of Coptic manuscript production through the creation of a digital atlas, SLA gets to the heart of the places where such documents were preserved, paying particular attention to all those contexts that, for example, were converted from pharaonic-period temples into libraries or archival centres during Late Antiquity. In effect, by analysing these contexts diachronically, SLA offers a thoroughly innovative perspective on the archaeology of Ancient Egypt. Published online on 21 March 2022, Sacri lapides Aegypti, released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence, adds to the growing body of open-source resources for Egyptological studies.
The website opens with a welcome page presenting the project and outlining its guidelines. Moving on, there is a section dedicated to the methodology adopted for the study of the archaeological contexts, followed by an alphabetical list of all the sites included in the catalogue. From this summary list one can access the individual site records (9), which are also reachable, alternatively, from a drop-down menu in the navbar under places.
Looking more closely at the nine records presented, these contain both general information about the sites — their historical toponymy, location, etc. — and detailed studies of the individual archaeological contexts/monuments investigated.
Each record opens with an introductory summary box listing, in the form of a list, the main information about each place: toponymic, geographic and chronological information, as well as the completion status of the records (complete or in progress). It is important to note that, in this section, particular attention is paid to linking SLA with the main databases of ancient places currently active. Indeed, for each place investigated, the corresponding identifier is provided in Trismegistos, Pleiades, PAThs and ToposText. The information box is accompanied by a map on which the location of the place described in the record can be viewed.
The second section of the records provides a discursive introduction to the history of the site, followed by one or more descriptions, in diachronic order (from the pharaonic to the late-antique period), of the structures and urban contexts investigated by the project. Bibliographic citations are inserted in the body of the text, and given in full at the end of the record in the dedicated bibliography paragraph, along with references to figures that are presented in the following section in a gallery format.
As mentioned, the third and final section of the records provides a gallery of images relating to the figures cited in the descriptions of the archaeological contexts/monuments. Each image is accompanied by a caption and its bibliographic source. The gallery allows images to be viewed full-screen and downloaded.
The data
At the time this review was written (March 2022), the Sacri lapides Aegypti catalogue lists 9 sites and 22 archaeological monuments/contexts:
- Alexandria
- Caesareum
- Serapeum
- Aswan
- Temple of Isis
- Unknown church (Temple of Ptolemy IV)
- Church with Martyrium and Baptistery (Area 6)
- Dendera
- Temple of Hathor, Isis and Harbaktes
- East Canopus
- Elephantine
- Temple of Khnum
- The so-called “Basilica”
- Church (?) of the harbour area
- Marea
- Basilica
- Marina el-Alamein
- South-eastern suburb
- Taposiris
- The Acropolis
- South-east area
- Western area
- Building complex with Basilica extra muros
- Thebes
- Djeme
- Qurnet Murai
- Deir el-Medina
- Ramesseum
- The hermitages of the Sheikh abd el-Qurna area
- The Topos of Epiphanius
- Deir el-Bakhit
The platform
The technology used to build the website is Gatsby, an open source static site generator based on the React framework, also open source, developed by Facebook. As for the mapping features used, Leaflet, an open source JavaScript library, is employed. The galleries, in turn, use the open source library Lightbox.js.
References
- Main page of the project: https://paths-erc.eu/sacri-lapides-aegypti/.
- Page on the website of the Department of History, Anthropology, Religions, Performing Arts, Sapienza University of Rome, mentioning the Department’s projects: https://saras.uniroma1.it/en/node/8426.