Moser, Marcel
Dissertation topic:
"Ex Aegyptiis ad Graecas rationes. The linguistic transition in the internal bookkeeping of the Soknopaios temple of Dimê in the 2nd/3rd century A.D."
Contact address at the University of Würzburg:
Institute of Classical and Ancient Studies
Chair of Egyptology
Residenzplatz 2/ Tor A
97070 Würzburg
First supervisor: Prof. Dr Stadler
Second supervisors:
Class in the Graduate School: "Antiquity, History and Religion"
Doctorate in the Graduate School from WS 2023/24.
Abstract:
Greek was the predominant administrative language in Egypt until the imperial period at the latest, which also applied to the temples. In this context, the Soknopaios temple of Soknopaiu Nesos (today: Dimê) is a major exception, as Demotic continued to be actively cultivated there well into the second century AD, among other things for the temple's internal bookkeeping. In the last 30 years, important progress has been made in the cataloguing of these documentary texts, as textual sources from the Demotic side in particular have been adequately edited for the first time. Although numerous documentary texts from the Greek administration were already known beforehand, they mostly only provided an external view of the economic dimensions of the temple.
The aim of this dissertation project is to comprehensively compare the accounting documents of the temple of Soknopaiu Nesos in Demotic and Greek in order to clarify the differences and interdependencies between the two administrative languages and to determine whether there are any indications in the surviving material as to how the Greek language replaced Demotic in the temple administration. It is also important to clarify definitively whether internal temple documents in Greek can be proven at all, as no such documents are known to date.
