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If you are planning to publish a Duke papyrus, you can consult the Duke Provenance Database for full records on the purchase and known earlier history for each of our papyri. Community best practice stipulates that, "in the publication, presentation, or exhibition of ancient papyri ... the author, speaker, or curator includes a frank and thorough discussion of the provenance of every item." For copyright reasons, the provenance database is available to researchers only on application. To gain access, write papyprovenance@duke.edu. (Updated 2025)

Browse the Duke Papyrus Archive

Browse by selected topics:

• Archives (family papers etc.)
• Cultural aspects (food etc.)
• Forms of documents (notarial etc.)
• Geographical names (with a map)
• Material aspects (potsherds etc.)
• No text (pictures)
• Religious aspects (early Christianity etc.)
• Script (bookhands etc.)
• Slaves
• Women and children

Browse by language:

• Languages and Scripts
• Hieratic
• Demotic
• Coptic
• Greek
• Latin
• Arabic

Information about papyri

• From the world of the papyri
• Writing in Egypt under Greek and Roman rule (now illustrated)
• Late antique Egypt
• History and future of papyrology
• General bibliography
• Bibliography on Greek literary papyri

Information about the Duke Papyrus Archive

The Duke Papyrus Archive provides electronic access to texts about and images of nearly 1400 papyri from ancient Egypt. The target audience includes: papyrologists, ancient historians, archaeologists, biblical scholars, classicists, Coptologists, Egyptologists, students of literature and religion and all others interested in ancient Egypt. The project of conserving, interpreting, cataloguing and imaging the largely unpublished Duke papyrus collection was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities , and is part of the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS) Project. Project staff at Duke have included Steven L. Hensen, John F. Oates, Peter van Minnen, Suzanne D. Corr, Paolo Mangiafico, Joshua Sosin, and John Bauschatz.

• Acquiring the Duke papyri (with a list of dossiers acquired together)
• Conserving the Duke papyri
• Interpreting the Duke papyri (with a list of papyrological handbooks)
• Cataloguing the Duke papyri (with an explanation of the format of the catalogue records)
• Imaging the Duke papyri
• Putting the Duke papyri online
• Editing the Duke papyri (with a list of published and forthcoming items)
  • P.Ammon I

Links to selected other resources relating to papyrology

Checklist of Editions

Checklist of Editions of Arabic Papyri

Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri (searchable via the Perseus Project)

• Material Not Yet Entered

Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS) Partners:

• University of Michigan Papyrus Collection Home Page
• The Tebtunis Papyri Collection at The University of California at Berkeley
• The Yale Papyrus Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Ms. Library
• Princeton Papyri Collections
• Columbia University

Other collections:

• Institut für Papyrologie at Universität Heidelberg (Images of all published papyri in the Heidelberg collections wherever published )
  • See the Gesamtverzeichnis
• Centro di Studi Papirologici at Università di Lecce
• University of Copenhagen (Images of P. Carlsberg)
• University of Cologne (Images of all published papyri in the Cologne collection)
• The Oxyrhynchus Papyri (Images of volumes 59, 60, 61 and 62
• Institut de Papyrologie de la Sorbonne (Paris IV)

Useful lists of papyrological resources on the web:

• American Society of Papyrologists
• ABZU: Papyrology Index at The University of Chicago, The Oriental Institute
• Fonti papiracee at Università di Bologna

Please see our page with contact information if you have any comments or questions about the Duke Papyrus Archive.