Prosopographia Memphitica

This searchable web-based database is the result of my doctoral research at the Freie Universität Berlin called 'Prosopographia Memphitica. Individuelle Identitäten und Kollektive Biographien einer Residenzstadt des Neuen Reiches', supervised by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Jochem Kahl and PD Dr. Dietrich Raue (University of Leipzig). The project was part of the TOPOI Research Group C1 - Deixis and Frames of Reference: Strategies of Perspectivation in Language, Text, and Image (Oct 2015-Oct 2018). An unpublished collection (card box) which has been compiled by Dietrich Raue since the 1990s and comprises 1121 individuals formed the basis of the database. Over the course of this project, the number of persons recorded in the corpus was doubled, so that the ProM collection currently comprises 2343 persons, i.e. 1528 men and 814 women as well as 992 Egyptian titles from different administrative sectors. Furthermore, the database records 1676 objects associated to the Memphite region, of which 56 % are nowadays spread over museums all over the world, whereas the other 44% remain in situ, were transferred to the excavation storerooms on site or are in an unknown location. The Egyptian Museum in Cairo owns 278 objects and thus forms the largest outpost of prosopographic material. Since the 1820s a large number of architectural elements and funerary equipment from Memphite tombs has made its way into the museums in Europe (as well as North-America and even Australia) through the activities of early excavators, and antiquities dealers. As a result, the collections of Leiden, London, Paris, Florence, Vienna, Berlin, Bologna, Turin and Hanover have become important European outposts of the Memphite region. In total, 118 different museums and collections in 28 countries have been identified that host relevant material for the present study. Although not all objects could have been examined during the course of the project, the accessible and published information concerning them, have been incorporated.