The 2025 publication year — fifty-three first editions across four corpora.
The journal's tenth annual finds summary consolidates the work of the 2025 calendar year — fifty-three published first editions across the four working corpora, six corrections to previously published readings, two reading-disagreement resolutions, and the year's structural notes on the working institutional partnerships.
The year in editions.
The 2025 publication year produced fifty-three first editions distributed across the four working corpora: Elephantine eighteen editions, demotic Tebtunis fourteen editions, Coptic Wadi al-Natrun thirteen editions, hieratic cross-corpus six editions, Greek-Egyptian bilingual two editions. The Elephantine concentration reflects the German Archaeological Institute's particularly productive 2024 and 2025 dig seasons; the Tebtunis production has been steady at twelve to sixteen editions per year over the past five years.
The standout publications.
The Ramesses XI offering account ostracon (Elephantine, OPF-2025-244, December issue) — an unusually long hieratic accounting document from the late Twentieth Dynasty garrison with twenty-seven lines preserving a complete daily offering rota. The document is the single longest hieratic accounting ostracon from the Elephantine corpus and adds a calibrated paleographic reference point for the last decade of the Twentieth Dynasty. The complete second column of the Naos Egyptien narrative (Tebtunis, OPF-2025-179, September issue) — the long-sought second column of the demotic narrative whose first column has been known since the 1899 Grenfell-Hunt expedition. The complete second column, recovered in the Berkeley team's spring 2025 work, allows the narrative's overall plot architecture to be reconstructed for the first time. The bishop Apa Mena codicil correspondence (Wadi al-Natrun, OPF-2025-301, December issue) — three previously-unread letters that complete the Apa Mena correspondence sub-corpus the journal published between 2019 and 2022. The codicil correspondence resolves the chronology of Apa Mena's final years as bishop of Sohag and is among the journal's most-anticipated single editions in five years.
The corrections issued.
Six corrections were published in 2025, all minor and all resolved within the standard thirty-day correction window. Three corrected paleographic readings on individual hieratic signs that had been read ambiguously in the original edition; the corrections came from reader review by paleography seminars at Heidelberg and Berkeley. Two corrected dating attributions on demotic documents where the original Berkeley team's published academic edition (which came out in 2024) gave a more precise date than the journal's original first edition; the corrections cited the Berkeley team's reading as the canonical update. One correction in the Coptic corpus where Father Tawadros's re-reading of a damaged section produced a different word than the original published edition.
The reading-disagreement resolutions.
Two structured paleographic disagreements were resolved in 2025. The Cleopatra-period demotic divorce contract (OPF-2023-118), where two outside paleographers had proposed alternative readings of a damaged section; the journal published all three readings in March 2025 with Hala's commentary and the institutional director's view, and the question is now open in the wider scholarly literature. The Apa Mena letter dating, where one outside reviewer had proposed a fifth-century rather than the journal's original fourth-century dating; Father Tawadros and the outside reviewer met in person at the Wadi al-Natrun monastery in October 2024 and produced a joint statement (published February 2025) maintaining the fourth-century dating with a clarified paleographic argument.
Structural notes on the institutional partnerships.
The German Archaeological Institute partnership renewed its master agreement through 2028 in November 2025 with no material change. The Berkeley Tebtunis partnership renewed in March 2025 through 2030. The Coptic Studies Institute partnership renewed in November 2023 and remains current through 2028. The Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology (Abu Sir el-Meleq) partnership came up for renewal in early 2025 and the renewal was completed in May 2025 through 2030 with one substantive change — the Polish team's restriction of Greek-Egyptian bilingual material to alongside-publication only (the journal can no longer publish Polish-source bilingual material as independent first editions). The restriction reflects the Polish team's own academic-publication queue prioritisation and is documented in the renewed agreement.
The 2026 outlook.
The 2026 publication year starts with the March issue (publishing 6 March 2026). The editorial board's expectation is fifty to sixty first editions for the calendar year, in line with the 2025 throughput. The major structural development in 2026 will be the launch of the journal's new searchable corpus platform (currently in beta), which will give subscribers full-text search across the ten-year archive at character, lemmatised and paleographic-feature levels; Bilal Sherif has been working on the platform since 2023 and the production launch is planned for September 2026.
The journal's full ten-year archive is available to Researcher and Institutional subscribers. The four corpus files (Elephantine, hieratic, demotic, Coptic) contain the year-by-year detail. The methodology sets out the editorial framework.