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Script, Image and the Culture of Writing in the Ancient World Funding: Andrew W Mellon Foundation (October 2001-September 2004) The Centre is undertaking, from 1 October 2001, a number of new projects which together constitute a programme entitled 'Script, Image and the Culture of Writing in the Ancient World', funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation. The programme consists of six elements: 1. Epigraphic sources for early Greek writing The CSAD proposes to catalogue and digitise the drawings, papers and photographs of the late L H Jeffery, whose Local Scripts of Archaic Greece has become the standard treatment of early Greek writing, to provide a comprehensive and detailed on-line resource for the study of early Greek writing. 2. Greek inscriptions in the Ashmolean Museum: The CSAD in collaboration with the Ashmolean Museum will undertake a programme of photographing the Museum's important collection of Greek inscriptions using a high resolution digital studio camera. 3. Photographic Archive of Papyri in the Cairo Museum. In the 1970s and 1980s an International Photographic Mission initiated and sponsored by the Association Internationale de Papyrologues and UNESCO made slides and photographs of the several thousand Greek papyri held in the Cairo Museum. This unique photographic archive, which consists of about 5000 slides and large format negatives, has never been fully catalogued or made widely accessible. The CSAD will undertake a programme of cataloguing and digitising the photographs with a view to making them available on-line. 4. Gazetteer of Papyri in British Collections. The CSAD proposes to compile a complete gazetteer, as far as is practicable, of the source, content and location of papyrus collections in libraries, museums, universities and private ownership in Britain, describing holdings, provenance, circumstances of acquisition and archival elements. The gazetteer will be organised as a database in electronic form, maintained, updated and made available through its own website. 5. Romano-British Writing-tablets from Vindolanda. This component of the programme involves the design and creation of a website consisting of texts and images of the Vindolanda writing-tablets and supporting material. The core of the site will be linked databases of texts and images. From these, the user will be able to proceed to other elements in the site which will provide supporting commentaries on the individual texts; an illustrated guide to the palaeography and the characteristics of early Latin writing; evidence for the physical context of the deposit at the site of Vindolanda in relation to the topography and buildings of the early forts; archaeological evidence for the artefacts, places, military institutions and other items mentioned in the texts. 6. Curse Tablets from the Uley Shrines (Gloucestershire). The CSAD proposes to develop a database and website for the texts and images of the lead curse-tablets from the shrines at Uley. The cache of tablets from this unique site consists of 140 examples, 86 containing traces of writing of which about 15 have been published. There is also an exceptionally good published archaeological context for this material which offers an opportunity to create a small but pioneering application in which new imaging processes specific to incised lead texts can be developed, and the tablets themselves can placed in their archaeological and material context and a vivid impression reconstructed of the religious and literary culture within which they were produced. Within the context of this programme, the Centre will be making four new appointments: of two full-time post-doctoral Research Assistants, one half-time IT Officer, and one half-time Administrative Assistant.
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