Please join us for a meeting of the Language Variation & Change Workshop, this Friday, February 15 at 3:30pm, in Rosenwald 301. A light reception will follow.

Patterns and parallels in Greek orthography of Egyptian names in Late Antiquity
Ella Karev, UChicago

The fifty-two Greek texts in the corpus of papyri from Elephantine are an invaluable source of information for the Late Antique community of the 3rd to the 7th centuries CE. In the publication of the Greek texts by Joel Farber in Bezalel Porten’s comprehensive The Elephantine Papyri in English (1996), the texts are accompanied by a prosopography containing 152 unique names. Of these, 81 (53%) are of discernibly Egyptian origin. Some of these names have known Egyptian antecedents from bilingual documents. However, for those names which do not appear in bilingual documents no reconstruction has been attempted. Despite extensive discussion regarding Greek orthography in general in papyri, Greek orthography of specifically Egyptian names, though touched upon in the 1970s, has since been largely laid by the wayside. Our understanding of Greek orthography of Egyptian names is in desperate need of updating, especially with the advent of databases such as trismegistos, which allow for more accurate analysis of existing documents. This paper employs names with known antecedents in order to set forth the patterns and parallels used in Greek orthography of Egyptian names in the Elephantine corpus. This pattern-mapping will then be used to build a series of orthographical conventions relevant to the corpus. Finally, this paper will make use of those conventions to suggest antecedents for a number of Egyptian names in the corpus with no known antecedents.