Piet and Etty Sijpesteijn fellow for papyri in the Allard Pierson collection

To what extent can a textual artifact itself provide insights to retrace its ownership history? Starting from this question, Efstathia Dionysopoulou’s project explores potential routes of provenance of the unpublished fragments from Prof. Sijpesteijn’s papyri collection. By adopting a textual artifact-oriented approach, the project hopes to fill in missing elements of the puzzled documented history of these fragments. Its goal is twofold. First, it conducts a systematic survey of the material to map the components of the collection. Second, it looks for cues that may reveal connections with published items from Sijpesteijn’s collection, as well as with documents and collections preserved elsewhere. Content-related, prosopographical, and palaeographical indicators, and the material features of the fragments play a central role. All data are gathered in a database designed to identify possible internal and external overlaps. In this way, the project aims to shed light on the broader trajectory of Prof. Sijpesteijn’s papyri collection. 

Efstathia Dionysopoulou has a background in Archaeology and Ancient History. She completed her PhD at the University of Strasbourg in 2021, and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at CNRS, Lyon (ERC Desert Networks) and at Leiden University (Anchoring Innovation research agenda). Her research interests include the study of papyrological and epigraphical textual artifacts, ideological and identity formation processes, social practices, cultural interactions, and multilingualism in Graeco-Roman Egypt.