Dioscorus case study

The archive of Dioscorus of Aphrodito (6th c. A.D.) is the richest papyrus archive of the Byzantine period. Gathering more than 700 texts of various content, it provides a unique opportunity to study day-to-day cursive writing and literacy in the microcosm of an Egyptian village. For an introduction to this archive, see 

  • J.-L.Fournet, C. Magdelaine (ed.), Les archives de Dioscore d'Aphrodité cent ans après leur découverte. Histoire et culture dans l'Égypte byzantine, 2008.
  • Giovanni Ruffini, Life in An Egyptian Village in Late Antiquity: Aphrodito Before and After the Islamic Conquest, 2018.
  • Trismegistos archive on Dioskoros www.trismegistos.org/archive/72 and Phoibammon son of Triadelphos www.trismegistos.org/archive/193 (Dioskoros' cousin whose archive is included in this case study)

In the scope of d-scribes project, images from this archive were annotated to segment the areas penned by various writers. See the pilot show-case (ongoing work) https://showcase.d-scribes.philhist.unibas.ch/Dioscorus

From the Dioscorus archive, a first dataset named GRK-Papyri was selected, specially tailored for the task of Writer Identification. It was published along with this article:

H. Mohammed, I. Marthot-Santaniello and V. Märgner, "GRK-Papyri: A Dataset of Greek Handwriting on Papyri for the Task of Writer Identification," 2019 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), Sydney, Australia, 2019, pp. 726-731.

see GRK-Papyri

GRK-Papyri_120 is an extension of GRK-Papyri from 50 to 120 images of papyri. It was segmented into rows to form the Papy-Row dataset (accessible here) and presented during the PatReCH workshop in ICPR 2020, see here.

GRK-Papyri_97 is a selection of GRK-Papyri_120 to count only 19 writers (97 images) is a study currently submitted to ICDAR 2023.

GRK-Papyri and Papy-Row are the basis or the following publications:

  • Nasir S., Siddiqi I., Moetesum M. (2021) "Writer Characterization from Handwriting on Papyri Using Multi-step Feature Learning". In: Barney Smith E.H., Pal U. (eds) Document Analysis and Recognition – ICDAR 2021 Workshops. ICDAR 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12916. Access here.
  • Nasir S., Siddiqi I. (2021) "Learning Features for Writer Identification from Handwriting on Papyri". In: Djeddi C., Kessentini Y., Siddiqi I., Jmaiel M. (eds) Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence. MedPRAI 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1322. Access here.
  • V. Christlein, I. Marthot-Santaniello, M. Mayr, A. Nicolaou, M. Seuret, “Writer Retrieval and Writer Identification in Greek Papyri”, eds. C. Carmona-Duarte, M. Diaz, M.A. Ferrer, A. Morales, Intertwining Graphonomics with Human Movements. IGS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13424. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19745-1_6. See also video 18 on this page from Neo-Paleography Conference
  • H. Sajjad, I. Siddiqi, M. Moetesum and I. Marthot-Santaniello, “Learning Structural Similarities from Handwriting on Papyri - An Application to Scribe Characterization,” 2023 International Conference on Frontiers of Information Technology (FIT), Islamabad, Pakistan, pp. 31-36, 2023https://doi.org/10.1109/FIT60620.2023.00016
  • M. Peer and R. Sablatnig, Feature Mixing for Writer Retrieval and Identification on Papyri Fragments, in HIP'23: 7th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (Jan Jose, CA, USA August 2023), https://doi.org/10.1145/3604951.3605515
  • N. D. Cilia, T. D’Alessandro, C. De Stefano, F. Fontanella, I. Marthot-Santaniello, M. Molinara and A. Scotto Di Freca, “A Novel Writer Identification Approach for Greek Papyri Images”, 4th International Workshop on Pattern Recognition for Cultural Heritage (PatReCH 2023), Udine, Italy, September 11, 2023. https://aida.unicas.it/patrech2023/index.html
  • M. Peer, R. Sablatnig, O. Serbaeva, and I. Marthot-Santaniello, “KaiRacters: Character-Level-Based Writer Retrieval for Greek Papyri”, in Antonacopoulos, A., Chaudhuri, S., Chellappa, R., Liu, CL., Bhattacharya, S., Pal, U. (eds) Pattern Recognition. ICPR 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15319. Springer, Cham, 2025https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78495-8_5
  • T. D’Alessandro, N. D. Cilia, C. De Stefano, F. Fontanella, M. Molinara, A. Scotto di Freca, and I. Marthot-Santaniello, "A Deep Transfer Learning Approach for Writer Identification in Greek Papyri", Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH) 18, 3, Article 43 (September 2025), p. 1-19, 2025https://doi.org/10.1145/3727263 

 

Sidra Nasir, "Identification of Scribes from Historical Manuscripts", Masters thesis in Computer Science defended in April 2021 at Bahria University, Islamabad, downloadable here.

To top