Lexicon of Greek Personal Names- Lower Egypt and the Fayum

This project will create an authoritative collection of Greek personal name evidence from Egypt, unlocking the potential contained in such names for innovative research into every aspect of ancient life in Greco-Roman Egypt. It forms part of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (LGPN) project which covers the period from the earliest historical records (8th c. BC) to the early Byzantine period (7th c. AD). LGPN is not just about names but about people. Every attested bearer of a name is included. It is thus a fundamental tool for research into most aspects of social history.
The seven published LGPN volumes (an eighth is imminent, a ninth in progress) have established themselves among the essential items in any ancient historian's toolbox. Through a succession of conferences and publications, LGPN has encouraged a boom in onomastic awareness and research, among literary scholars and social historians as well as epigraphists. Those nine volumes will have covered the whole ancient Greek world from Italy to Pakistan, other than Egypt. We plan to tackle Egypt in two phases; the first, the subject of the present application, is to cover Lower (i.e. northern) Egypt (the Nile delta) and the Fayum oasis. Our current estimate of the number of persons involved is c. 100,000, i.e. on a scale to require two volumes of c. 450 folio pages.
The history of Greco-Roman Egypt is the history of the imposition of first Greek, then Roman rule upon a tenacious ancient culture. Naming is one of the key sources of evidence for the complicated cultural accommodations and resistances that occurred. Male Egyptians seeking to get ahead in the public sphere often took a Greek name in addition to an Egyptian (sometime 'translated' from the latter); under Roman rule they often bore two Greek names, apparently in imitation of the two (or three) names borne by Roman citizens. The emergence of numerous Greco-Egyptian hybrid names by contrast attests a sense in which cultural mixing was taken for granted. Later, new names become a crucial if controversial index of the spread of Christianity.
Egypt presents two special challenges. First, evidence in Greek here co-exists with that in Egyptian demotic. Second, because of the survival of papyri in a dry climate, the quantity of evidence available is uniquely abundant. We will meet both challenges by collaboration with the creators of Leuven's Egyptological website Trismegistos (TM), which has already collected most of the names attested in Greek and Egyptian (demotic) sources, but in a form which urgently requires sifting and sorting. Importing the Leuven data through a specially designed interface will allow much rapider progress than in previous volumes. These twin strategies will allow us to include the seemingly unmanageably copious Egyptian material in user-friendly form within our series of published volumes, and also on the searchable website along with the rest of the Greek world.
Results will be disseminated via the two volumes (listing every bearer of every name under place of origin), the website, and a sixth conference-plus-volume in the established LGPN series, at which experts will tackle the issues of cultural interaction and change posed by the Egyptian material with the aid of the evidence collected by the project.
LGPN has always been an important presence in the field of Digital Humanities, most recently since a major conversion of the database to allow full online searching on the basis of (e.g.) location, time, and status. In collaboration with a team led by Project Partner Sophie Minon of Paris we will develop a 'linguistic extension' (LGPN-Ling) which will provide a full linguistic analysis of all Greek names in the database. We will launch LGPN into the world of Linked Open Data via an open source tool, to be created in 2018, which will embed links to LGPN in the digital 'Inscriptions of Sicily' and which we will re-use to link up with all other digital epigraphic corpora.

The beneficiaries of the project's work beyond professional academics are:
1/ The many members of the general public who visit ancient world exhibitions and watch/listen to ancient world programmes; Anglo-Greek citizens (see Pathways 1 (c), 2 -4)
2/ Schoolchildren, at both a primary (Pathways 1 (a)) and secondary (Pathways 1 (b)) level.
3/ University and continuing education students (Pathways 2-4).
4/ The general public outside this country. Ancient Greek names are attested from the territories of modern Afghanistan, Albania, Bulgaria, Rumania, Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt, France , Georgia , Greece, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Jordan , Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Macedonia, Montenegro, Russian federation, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, UAE, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Yemen. The project relates to the early history of large swathes of the globe. The Lexicon is very highly esteemed in Greece as a British contribution to its cultural history. Many ordinary Greeks consult it to learn about the history of their own names, and the Lexicon has received supplementary financial support for particular projects from the most prestigious institutions, the Archaeological Society of Athens and the Academy of Athens, as also from The National Bank of Greece, the Alpha Bank and the Costopoulos Foundation, not to forget three Greek societies in the UK. Volume V has made it also a point of reference for the social history of pre-Islamic Turkey, volume VI is doing the same for the Middle and Far East, and volume VII will bring in pre-Islamic Egypt.
The published volumes have generated c. £380,000 of sales to date, mostly abroad. But the main impact of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names will always be one of educational and cultural enrichment. Many individuals bear names that derive from ancient Greek names, often through the intermediary of a Christian saint. The 'Greek Names in English' feature on the website allows such origins to be checked. Curiosity about one's own name aside, attention to names imports a new and vivid dimension to study of the ancient world at all levels. The concepts are not difficult or technical. It is exciting to learn that the most powerful politician in Athens in the 470s and 460s named a son 'Spartan', as if Mr Blair had named a daughter 'America'; looking at the mix of Greek, Carian and Persian names in an inscription from Herodotus' native city is a uniquely vivid way to come to appreciate the historian's multi-cultural world. But our project provides access not just to names but also to people, every single person from an identified place of origin whose name survives recorded in Greek over about 1300 years; it has been called the telephone directory (Facebook?) of the Greek world. There is enormous public interest in the Greeks and in the ancient world more generally, and the challenge is to bring our work to the attention of all those who visit the classical galleries in museums, all those who holiday in classical lands, all those who engage with the classical world at school or college. Any attentive visitor to Egypt will note the extraordinary mixed culture that emerges in the Greco-Roman period, when Greeks and Romans find themselves depicted in the age-old conventions of Egyptian art, and brought face to face with Osiris on funerary monuments. That complicated cultural mixture appears no less in the naming practices to be studied in our new project. This evidence of names needs to be made as 'visible' as that of art. We will do this primarily (see 'Pathways') through an exhibition mounted in the Classics Centre in Oxford, a hub around which we will arrange a cluster of visits by schoolchildren of various ages and lectures for adults; the exhibition will then provide the basis of an interactive 'virtual exhibition' (which will open many possibilities not open to a physical exhibition) on our website.