The Iliad papyri are an obvious case study to begin with: the content of Homer's Iliad is well established, the corpus is numerous (around 1,500 extant fragments with Iliad texts on them) and spanned over the entire papyrological millennium, i.e. from the 3rd century BC to the 7th century AD. This corpus is therefore representative of the chronological evolution of Greek scripts, but also of their various utilizations, from school exercises to expensive calligraphic books. The main goal of this case study is to find as many joins as possible among the 1,500 already known pieces and to cluster them by stylistic similarities.

Since March 2021, READ platform is used and further developped to annotate images of Iliad papyri at a character level in order to provide efficient tools for palaeographical analyses and generate datasets for computational approaches based on Machine Learning.

DIBCO 2019 Papyri Dataset

From the Iliad papyri was selected a dataset for the Competition on Document Image Binarization (DIBCO 2019) as part of ICDAR 2019, see DIBCO 2019 Papyri Dataset.

DIBCO dataset is used in Gwenael Gendre's Master thesis, "Character Recognition in Ancient Greek Papyrus", defended at the University of Fribourg in June 2021, downloadable here.

Worldwide public reading of the Iliad

D-scribes took part in the International public reading of the Iliad on March 22nd, 2019, from 10-11 a.m. In the Rathaus (town hall), we read aloud our favourite passages of Iliad, among them the texts which are preserved on the two papyrus fragments belonging to the University’s collection. Watch the videos here.

Homer Exhibition in the Basel University Library

Here you can virtually visit the exhibition Homer, Ilias und Basel which we hosted in order to show the Iliad papyri to the general public, and to inform about the research projects going on in Basel. Take a look here.