Combine date expressions (e.g. '2nd century BC' or '50-66 CE'), places (e.g. 'Elephantine' or 'France'), personal names (e.g. 'Horos' or 'Θέωνος'), collections (e.g. 'BL' or 'Louvre'), TM stable identifiers (e.g. 'TM Nam 34'), inventory numbers, publication numbers, writing surface, language, authors and works, LDAB information (religion, bookform, ...) and much more.
you can now also use EDCS numbers, e.g. 'EDCS-27900304'; other project IDs to follow
... 1754 years ago (AD 270 Apr 30), a Greek text on papyrus now kept in Vienna was written in Hermopolis: TM 18711
Click here to discover more texts written on this day in antiquity!
TM Gallery
TM Gallery is our 'hall of fame' of antiquity, collecting noteworthy texts with a brief description of their history and whereabouts. Some are downright famous (like the Rosetta stone), but we hope you will discover a couple of unknown gems here as well.
Each week, a new text will be given a chance to shine.
Trismegistos Data Services is a set of open services (API's and table dumps) developed in the Linked Open Data framework of DARIAH-BE. If you wish to work with our data, you can find more information here.
Trismegistos Online Publications (TOP) provides freely downloadable pdf-documents with scholarly tools based upon or providing links to the Trismegistos database. TOP Special Series is intended for manuscripts that are more synthetic in nature than the 'standard' series, but still strongly data-oriented by the nature of their subjects. Read more
TM Corpusdata publishes data sets that were assembled for journal papers. Since it's not always easy to reconstruct them from the vast and ever-expanding halls that make up the TM database, we have designed this site to provide you with the data assembled to conduct the study.
Each individual record in each of Trismegistos' databases is identified by a unique number, a so-called 'stable identifier'. As the term implies, this number generally does not change and can thus be used to form a stable url to refer to a specific entity.
Because of its organic growth and evolving focus since 2005 (see history), Trismegistos has a very different coverage for each section, according to region, period and genre. Check out the 'About' page of each individual section to learn more!
Are you interested in collaborating? Let us know! (See contact options below)
About Trismegistos
Trismegistos was conceived in 2004 when Mark Depauw was granted a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung to set up his own research team at a German university, in this case Cologne. The project Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in Graeco-Roman Egypt wanted to investigate language shifts in relation to cultural identity, by setting up an online database of Graeco-Roman papyrological material in Egyptian scripts parallel to and in close cooperation with the existing tools of Greek papyrology (the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis griechischer Urkunden aus Ägypten [HGV] and its literary counterpart, the Leuven Database of Ancient Books [LDAB]
In the meantime, Trismegistos has expanded in several directions. From late 2008 onwards, the people and places mentioned in these sources from Egypt have been collected in TM People and TM Places. In 2010, Trismegistos ventured outside Egypt for the first time to incorporate the Latin epigraphic sources and the toponyms they contain. Integration of many indigenous languages has also taken place since then. Since 2018, work has also started on Greek epigraphy. Finally, When available in online repositories, Trismegistos includes unpublished sources as well. Read more
Database structure
The online version of Trismegistos works with MySQL and PHP, but for data entry a set of relational Filemaker databases are used, currently in a mixed Filemaker 16 environment. The core of the database is Trismegistos Texts, where each individual record is identified by a unique, stable Trismegistos number (for criteria what constitutes a record, click here). This number is used to link to most of the other constituent databases of Trismegistos, and allows for easy implementation of one-to-many and many-to-one relationships. Read more
Who does all the work?
The ever-expanding TM platform does not materialize out of nowhere. Many people have put many days, hours, years of hard work into its various databases, often on a voluntary basis. Read more
Help us!
Trismegistos is a work in progress. We would greatly appreciate your help, in any way. Read more
This site uses cookies to provide you with the best user experience. By using Trismegistos, you accept our terms and conditions, including the use of cookies.
