Seminar für Ägyptologie und Koptologie

Lecture Series "Digital Coptic Textual Studies"

A Decade of Digital Research on the Written Heritage of Christian Egypt in Göttingen and Beyond

To mark ten years of work on a "born digital" edition of one of the most important literary translations of Late Antiquity, central to the history of one of the main Christian churches in the Near East, the Old Testament in Coptic, the Institute for Egyptology and Coptic Studies at the University of Göttingen and the Digital Edition of the Coptic Old Testament at the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Göttingen will organise a series of lectures on "Digital Coptic Textual Studies".

This lecture series will showcase not only the work of the Göttingen Coptic Old Testament edition itself, its achievements and future directions, but also that of several of its main cooperation partners. For the last ten years, virtually all digital projects and other stakeholders in Coptological text-based studies have cooperated in productive and innovative ways to overcome the unique challenges of the field, in particular the extremely dispersed and fragmentary nature of its manuscript transmission. The digital turn in Coptic Studies has been instrumental in overcoming past challenges and providing new directions in manuscript studies and philology, digital corpus linguistics or lexicography.

The lectures will take place online via Zoom (some in hybrid format) on Wednesdays, 4:15-6 pm CET, starting November 12, 2025. The link for online participation (Zoom) can be found here.



— Programme —

November 12, 2025
Welcome and Introduction to the Series
Prof. Heike Behlmer (University of Göttingen)

The Göttingen ‘Complete Digital Edition and Translation of the Coptic Sahidic Old Testament’ after 10 Years of Project Work: Introduction and Progress Report
Dr. Frank Feder / Malte Rosenau, M.A. (Digital Edition of the Coptic Old Testament, Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony)

Since 2015, the Göttingen Academy Project has been working in its Virtual Manuscript Room on the cataloguing and diplomatic and critical edition of the fragmentary manuscript tradition of the Sahidic Coptic Old Testament. After providing an overview of the current status of the work and presenting the editions already available, the lecture will focus on the implementation of the experience gained, which in a long-term project can and must lead to new strategic decisions and new technical and editorial standards.


November 19, 2025
Collaboration and Computation in Coptic Studies
Prof. Caroline T. Schroeder / Prof. Amir Zeldes (University of Oklahoma / Georgetown University)

Over the past 13 years, digital Coptic Studies has flourished across the globe. Building on core foundational work by pioneers such as Tito Orlandi, Stephen Emmel, and Hany Takla, the Coptic Studies community has built a vibrant digital ecosystem. This paper will provide a retrospective on the role of international collaboration in building digital Coptic Studies, examples of computational research that now can be done on the Coptic SCRIPTORIUM platform thanks to such collaborations, and suggestions for future work in the field.


November 26, 2025
HTR for Coptic Manuscripts: Building on Ten Years of Digital Transcription
Prof. Eliese-Sophia Lincke (Freie Universität Berlin & Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften)



Over the past decade, the Göttingen Academy project Digital Edition of the Coptic Old Testament has produced the most comprehensive collection of expert-transcribed Coptic manuscripts. These data now make it possible to train reliable Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) models that can support future transcription and edition work across the field.
This talk presents an HTR workflow tailored to the characteristics of Coptic documentary and literary hands, developed within the eScriptorium environment using Kraken. It discusses how expert transcriptions can be transformed into training data, how layout information can be standardized via SegmOnto, and what accuracy levels can realistically be achieved with the available material. Beyond technical results, the talk reflects on how a decade of philological effort can now feed into a broader digital ecosystem for Coptic studies, where open data and shared models accelerate manuscript accessibility and enable new forms of research in digital palaeography and layout-based manuscript studies.


December 10, 2025
The PAThs project: ongoing activities and future perspectives
Prof. Paola Buzi/Prof. Julian Bogdani (Università "La Sapienza", Rom)

From its inception, the PAThs project was designed to be long-lasting, reliable, and constantly updated. At the same time, however, it was also conceived to host possible new types of data and answer new research questions. In the time at our disposal, we will attempt to provide an overview of the project's current directions, three years after the 'conclusion' of the ERCEA funding phase.


January 14, 2026
THOTH.AI: a Large Language Model for Ancient Egyptian and Coptic
Prof. So Miyagawa (University of Tsukuba, Japan)

THOTH.AI is a large-scale language model for Ancient Egyptian and Coptic using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture. This approach addresses fundamental challenges faced by low-resource historical languages by integrating vectorized philological resources—such as a lexical database with etymology—with modern language models, thus enabling semantic search and retrieval across different historical periods and writing systems. The RAG approach significantly improves machine translation accuracy between various stages of Ancient Egyptian–Coptic and modern languages, enables intertextuality analysis to identify textual similarities, and supports multiple computational tasks, including transliteration and text reconstruction.


January 21, 2026
Digitale Lexikographie der koptischen Sprache.
Die Projekte Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae und Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic
Prof. Tonio Sebastian Richter (Freie Universität Berlin & Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften)

Zwei Langzeit-Projekte standen in den letzten fünfzehn Jahren im Zentrum der digitalen Lexikographie der koptischen Sprache. Der von zwei Akademien (BBAW, SAW) gemeinsam erarbeitete Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (TLA) ist eine digitale Volltext-Datenbank der Altägyptisch-Koptischen Sprache. Während zunächst das Textcorpus auf hieroglyphische, hieratische und demotische Texte beschränkt war, ist die Implementierung eines koptischen Corpus geplant und auf der Ebene der Lemmata bereits vorgebildet. Die Integration der synchronen Wortlisten des TLA zu einer einzigen, diachronen Struktur wird ein einzigartiges digitales etymologisches Wörterbuch der Koptischen generieren. Das an der FU Berlin angesiedelte DFG-Langzeitprojekt Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic (DDGLC) stellt erstmals den in der ägyptisch-koptischen Lexikographie von Anbeginn ignorierten griechischen Lehnwortschatz der ägyptischen Sprache dar, der im 1. Jahrtausend n.Chr. einen enorm hohen Anteil am koptischen Lexikon bildete.


January 28, 2026
Digitale koptische Papyrologie – Alltagstexte edieren und encodieren auf papyri.info
Prof. Gesa Schenke / Daniel Kischko, M.A. (Universität Münster)

Die Forschungsstelle Digitale koptische Papyrologie in Münster (DigiKopt) widmet sich der Aufarbeitung, Encodierung und Vernetzung koptischer Alltagstexte der ägyptischen Spätantike auf der Plattform papyri.info. Zeugnisse alltäglicher Ereignisse im Leben der antiken Bevölkerung Ägyptens, wie Ackerpachten, Schuldscheine, Verträge, private Abrechnungen, Mitteilungen und Briefe, sollen so sichtbar und weltweit zugänglich gemacht werden


February 4, 2026
Natural Language Processing Tools for Coptic and Pre-Coptic Egyptian
Prof. Roberto Antonio Díaz Hernández (Universidad de Jaén)

Over the past decade, we have witnessed a digital revolution in the development of natural language processing (NLP) tools for low-resource languages, such as Egyptian. In my paper I will provide an overview of the NLP tools that have been developed for each stage of Egyptian. I will also discuss the advantages and risks of using these tools to study Egyptian and Coptic grammar. And I will outline future methods for creating new NLP tools for Coptic and Pre-Coptic Egyptian.