Friday, May 28, 2010

Online Resource - The Edfu Project

The Edfu Project

Thanks to the Ancient World Online blog for highlighting this project to record and translate texts from the temple of Edfu. It a site plan, photographs of the temple and of a scale model of the temple, multimedia resources and downloads. Most importantly the website includes a freely accessible online library of monographs, articles, and manuscripts on material about the Edfu district. Here's an exerpt from the introduction.

The Edfu texts had been published for decades before they were worked on adequately. Because of the extraordinarily large amount of texts, most linguistic and factual problems could be solved by searching the rest of the material for comparable cases.

In 1986, Professor Dr. Dieter Kurth of Hamburg University initiated a long-term project that is devoted to a complete translation of the Edfu inscriptions that meets the requirement of both linguistics and literary studies. It was triggered by the frustrating experience that parallel passages and comparable contents were nearly lost among those 3.000 pages of hieroglyphs if researchers did not start to search every single page afresh when they came across a problem.
In a way, this meant that researchers always had to start from scratch if they attempted to further our knowledge of the Edfu texts.

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