Online Encyclopedia of the Reception of Ancient Egypt (ERAE): Building the infrastructure for an encyclopedia on the history of the reception of ancient Egypt

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Julia Budka
• Subject Area: Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies ; History of Science
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 552400317

The aim of this project is to compile the first encyclopedia of the history of the reception of Egypt (working title: “Encyclopedia of the Reception of Ancient Egypt”, ERAE). It will be published online, in English, in html format and in diamond open access under the CC BY-SA license. Editors are Prof. Julia Budka (Munich), Dr. Florian Ebeling (Munich) and Prof. Miguel John Versluys (Leiden/NL). Research on the history of the reception of ancient Egypt has been thriving, since the turn of the millennium in particular. Numerous studies from different disciplinary backgrounds have been published and various very successful and well attended conferences have been organised. Since 2017, even an online, open access journal (Aegyptiaca. Journal of the History of Reception of Ancient Egypt) is published. This has resulted in the development of a lively and multivocal scholarly discourse. ERAE will make all this research systematically accessible, document the scholarly state-of-the-art and thus prepare and develop further research. The articles will be linked to each other and will consist of micro-analyses on individual reception testimonies (e.g. Corpus Hermeticum, Appartamento Borgia) as well as on specific topics within a narrowly defined framework (e.g. Hieroglyphs in Baroque Literature). The editors estimate a total of 500 lemmas, which will be written by 100 authors. All contributions will be peer reviewed and in a standardised format, including texts, images and, where appropriate, audio and video files; everything hosted by Heidelberg University Library. The multifaceted interconnections between the peer-reviewed articles and the text, image, audio and video files will enable for cross-disciplinary engagement, thereby offering each respective research perspective the possibility to expand and develop. In the second project phase, approximately 20 longer essays (e.g. ‘the understanding of the hieroglyphs’) will be published, based on and linked to all articles which are already online. ERAE can be used in a variety of ways, in the first place as a classic concise dictionary in which the individual entries can be found using a keyword search or via the catalogue of sources, the latter of which refers from individual sources to the corresponding articles. In addition, the essays offer overviews which in their turn refer to the individual entries and sources and can thus be verified. In order to reach a broad readership, a reference to each ERAE article will be incorporated into the corresponding Wikipedia article; each publication will also be announced on social media.

• DFG Programme: Science Communication, Research Data, eResearch (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)