Italian excellence still passes through culture. The protagonist this time is the Egyptian museum of Turin, winner ofEuropean Heritage Award/Europa Nostra Award 2020 for the project Turin Papyrus Online Platform (Tpop). It is an interesting and innovative project, namely the digitization of part of the museum's papyrus collection, which includes 230 papyri e 50 documents (especially texts from the Ramesside period, from Deir El Medina, in hieratic, cursive hieroglyphs and demotic Greek) that can be consulted online by registered users of the platform. It was the winner of the award Christian Greco, director of the Egyptian museum, together with Susan Topfer, curator of the papyrological collection, as well as creator of the Tpop project.
The project, which began in 2017 and which ended last September, aims to make available a vast catalog of papyri online for professionals and non-professionals. Thanks to the Turin Papyrus Online Platform, even simple Egyptology enthusiasts will be able to consult the various papyri online.
The motivations of the jury that awarded the prestigious award are based precisely on the new way of accessibility and of enjoyment of culture thanks to digital: "Having such an online, open access and high resolution platform is a great value for museums, especially considering its potential to be used for the creation of a European digital museum, which can bring together a homogeneous virtual collection, impossible. to be obtained on a material level. The application of the tools of the digital age is a contribution to the development of knowledge and to the conservation of material culture and its open accessibility, both to scientists and to the general public, promotes its dissemination.".
Tpop: papyri online in open access at the Egyptian Museum in Turin
The Turin Papyrus Online Platform project is an alternative way to "visit online”The Egyptian Museum of Turin. By accessing the portal, users will be able to admire some of its most precious assets, even in this period marked by the pandemic of Covid-19. To consult the papyri and documents available, the user must register on the platform. Once this is done, you will have access to the photos of the papyri in the collection (already exhibited in the windows of the Egyptian Museum in Turin or still stored in warehouses). Each papyrus will also be accompanied by the various transcriptions and translations of the texts made by the Egyptologists.
The papyrus collection kept in Torino è the largest in Europe. There are in fact about 700 manuscripts and more than 1.700 fragments of the period that goes 2650 - 2160 BC (Old Kingdom) To 642 - 1252 ADsystem. (Islamic period). As assured by the curator of the project herself, the Turin Papyrus Online Platform (Tpop) will be updated periodically, with new papyri and documents. This would then lead to the creation of a truly “pharaonic” online database, which could one day include the entire papyrus collection of the Egyptian museum in Turin.
