About The APIS Project

APIS is a collections-based repository hosting information about and images of papyrological materials (e.g. papyri, ostraca, wood tablets, etc) located in collections around the world. It contains physical descriptions and bibliographic information about the papyri and other written materials, as well as digital images and English translations of many of these texts. When possible, links are also provided to the original language texts (e.g. through the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri). The user can move back and forth among text, translation, bibliography, description, and image. With the specially-developed APIS Search System many different types of complex searches can be carried out.

APIS includes both published and unpublished material. Generally, much more detailed information is available about the published texts. Unpublished papyri have often not yet been fully transcribed, and the information available is sometimes very basic. If you need more information about a papyrus, you should contact the appropriate person at the owning institution. (See the list of contacts under  Rights & Permissions.)

APIS is still very much a work in progress; current statistics are shown in the sidebar at right. Other statistics are available on the statistics page in the project documentation.  Curators of collections interested in becoming part of APIS are invited to communicate with Roger Bagnall, Director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at New York University, (212) 992-7833.

Individual APIS records can now be accessed directly by other systems as XML documents.  For information about the http syntax for such access, please contact Stephen Davis, the APIS technical coordinator.

Papyrus Conservation Guidelines (by Leyla Lau-Lamb, University of Michigan)

Imaging Guidelines (by Dave Ortiz and Rodney Ast, Columbia University)

Metadata Guidelines (Columbia University)

APIS has been brought into being with the help of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), a federal agency, and substantial support from all of the participating institutions. In addition, the National Endowment for the Humanities supported much of the work of cataloguing and imaging at Duke University through a separate, earlier grant. The original creation of the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri, which is a major part of APIS, was funded largely by grants from the Packard Humanities Institute.  Its subsequent development into a form usable on the World Wide Web has benefited from substantial assistance from the Perseus Project, located at Tufts University.