Prosopographia Memphitica

The Project The searchable web-database is a result of the author’s dissertational project: Prosopographia Memphitica. Individuelle Identitäten und Kollektive Biographien einer königlichen Residenzstadt des Neuen Reiches at the Freie Universität Berlin, supervised by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Jochem Kahl (Freie Universität) and PD Dr. Dietrich Raue (Universität Leipzig) and funded by a Doctoral Fellowship at Excellence cluster TOPOI 264(Research Group C-1: Deixies and Frames of References: Strategies of Perspectivation inLanguage, Text, and Image. The primary aim of the Prosopographia Memphitica Project is to attain a regional prosopography for the Memphite region of the second millennium BC, which shall shed new light not only on the identity of individuals, but on the reconstruction of personal connections within a historical network of people. The sources The archaeologicalremains of the city of Memphis and its related necropoleis are located 18 km south of modern Cairo on today's west bank of the Nile. Although the scientific discussion about the site and its monuments forms an independent research focus, the archaeological legacy of the New Kingdom burial sites (1539–1077 BC) remained uninvestigated for a very long time. It was not until 1975 that the systematic documentation of tombs of the Memphite elite necropolis at Saqqara was been initiated by the Egypt Exploration Society in cooperation with the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden. Since then several other fieldwork missions were able to unearth further New Kingdom burial sites. As a result, the region known as Memphitenecropolis covers an area of about 40 sqm and reaches from Zawiyet el-Aryan in the North to Dahschur in the South.<br> <br> <br> <br> Altogether 84 monumental tomb structures, whose physical existence is known or has been recorded in thepast, have been identified so far. They eventually revealed numerous prosopographic data. Relevant texts and inscriptions are to be found not only on the walls of the tombs, but also ondifferent types of objects that were part of the tomb’s original decoration or equipment. First Steps As a first step towards the aim the compilation of prosopographical data has begun at the outset of the project byincorporating all data entries of a so far unpublished card box collection that has beencompiled by Dietrich Raue since the 1990s; it comprised 1 121 individuals: 878 male and 243female persons. In the course of this first phase the data has been supplemented within formation from preliminary reports and final publications as well as additional relevantstudies and collection catalogues. Monuments and artefacts from altogether 114 museumsand collections all over the world have been included to the data collection. The Database Due to the increasingamount of relational data a complex relational database model has been created usingPostgreSQL. The relational model of the database management is m:n and 1:n. A n:m relation is used to denote a many-to-many relationship, where m-objects on the one side are relatedto n-objects on the other side. In addition, 1:n relations refer to a one-to-many relationship,that means 1-object on the one side can be related to n-objects on the other side. The highstandardisation of the data form and structure enables an easy access as well as the application of external analysis software and visualisation tools, such as the network analysis software Gephi or Jupyter notebook, which is an OpenSource interactive computational environment (IPython) for creating analyses and visualisations from existing data libraries.<br> The data collection currently comprises 2.350 persons, 1.662 objects, and 980 titles, which are connected by 25.324 relations. This data set forms an amount of prosopographical data that has not yet beenprocessed for New Kingdom Egypt. To ensure the scientific transparency of the research argumentation, but also continuity of data editing respectively recording of new data, data storage and long-term provision of research results in a structured file format (JSON), the database has been published as a citable web publication.