![]() The settlement was home to the community of workers (and their families) who built the royal tombs in the Valleys of the Kings and Queens in the Late Bronze Age (c. The project Crossing Boundaries: Understanding Complex Scribal Practices in Ancient Egypt applies both approaches to the study of the papyri from the Late Bronze Age village of Deir el-Medina ( ). ![]() In recent years, two important research axes have been developed in digital humanities: (a) the philological approach has addressed the digitalisation of large documentary corpora and developed state-of-the-art databases (Behlmer and Feder 2017) (b) the cognitive approach has focussed on the contribution that machine learning and artificial intelligence can provide to our understanding of humanities (Rosmorduc 2020). In this paper, we highlight the limitations of current virtual research environments and digital images for ancient manuscripts studies, exemplified on the papyrus fibres, and how the synergy with modern machine learning techniques can widen their usability. In dealing with these papyri, the interdisciplinary project Crossing Boundaries: Understanding Complex Scribal Practices in Ancient Egypt, financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.–FNRS) and led by the University of Basel, the University of Liège, and the Museo Egizio in Turin, seeks to overcome the epistemological and methodological boundaries between archaeology, digital humanities, informatics, papyrology, palaeography, prosopography, and textual research. The papyri originate from Deir el-Medina, the New Kingdom workers’ settlement on the Theban Westbank (1300–1070 BCE). The corpus of papyri housed in the Museo Egizio in Turin comprises some 9000 fragments and approximately 230 larger ensembles and forms the most extensive known papyrus archive from the Pharaonic period.
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