Project Description

The Digital Edition of the Coptic Old Testament is a long-term project at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony. It fills a huge lacuna, as no modern edition of the Bible in Coptic exists. The project aims to provide a complete documentation of the manuscript evidence, digital editions of all OT manuscripts, critical editions of all OT books, corpus-linguistic analyses and translations into English, German and Arabic.

Aims and Methodology

• Codicological and textual reconstruction of all extant witnesses to the Coptic-Sahidic Old Testament
• Standardised system for naming Coptic biblical codices
• Development of digital tools for the Coptic Bible / Coptic literature (e.g., Manuscript Speculation Tool, Sahidic Bible Citation Database)

Outcomes

• A List of Coptic Biblical Manuscripts (in cooperation with S. Richter and K. Sandmeier, INTF Münster)
• Digital editions (diplomatic & critical) and translations of the OT 
• Huge corpus of digitised texts for the lexicography, dialectology and linguistic history of Ancient Egyptian
• With cooperation partners: 
  • a digital edition and information gateway for the entire Coptic Bible
  • a virtual library of Coptic literature and manuscripts
  • integrated digital linguistic analysis and lexicography tools
    • an annotated corpus of the Sahidic Old Testament created from our Basetext is available on the website of our partner project Coptic Scriptorium
  • digital text re-use and digital stylometry research