Ten years of paleographic editions, five editors in Aswan, four working corpora.

How it started.

Mostafa el-Kanawati joined the EAA's epigraphic survey office in 2005 as a junior paleographer. By 2014 he was the senior paleographer responsible for the hieratic and demotic readings on material being processed for institutional publication. His professional brief involved reading newly excavated ostraca and papyrus fragments before the material entered the formal academic-publication queue, and his readings often sat in EAA filing cabinets for five to nine years before the institutional academic publication brought them into the public scholarly record. The publication delay, structural and well-understood within the EAA, was Mostafa's recurring frustration: paleographically important material sat unread by the wider scholarly community for nearly a decade while the institutional academic cycle worked through it.

The journal was the answer Mostafa worked out in late 2015 in conversation with three colleagues at the Elephantine excavation house. The proposal was straightforward: a quarterly journal that would publish first-edition transcriptions of newly excavated material with the institutional project director's consent, in months rather than years, with the explicit understanding that the institutional academic publication remained the canonical source and that our editions were complementary. Three excavation project directors agreed in writing before the first issue went out. The fourth project (Wadi al-Natrun monastic sites) joined in 2018. The first issue, March 2016, carried eleven first-edition transcriptions. The cooperative was incorporated as Elephantine Epigraphy Press S.A.E. in late 2016.

The five editors.

Mostafa el-Kanawati — founder and lead editor (hieratic). Born Aswan 1976. Eleven years at the EAA epigraphic survey office through 2015. Specialist subjects: hieratic accounting documents, Ramesside-period paleography, the Elephantine garrison archive. Reads hieratic, demotic, classical Egyptian, Greek and conversational Arabic and English. Signs the hieratic editions personally.

Hala Habashy — demotic specialist. Born Cairo 1982. PhD American University in Cairo, 2010, thesis on Tebtunis demotic marriage contracts. Joined the journal in 2017. Lead editor for the demotic corpus and for the Tebtunis institutional partnership. Speaks Arabic, English, French and modern Greek; reads classical Greek and demotic Egyptian.

Father Tawadros Aziz — Coptic editor. Born Asyut 1971. Trained as a Coptic Studies graduate at the Institute of Coptic Studies in Cairo (1989–94) and was ordained in the Coptic Orthodox church in 2003. Holds an honorary position at the Coptic Studies Institute and has lived alongside the Wadi al-Natrun monastic community for fifteen years. Joined the journal in 2018 as the lead editor for the Coptic monastic-letters corpus. Reads Sahidic, Bohairic and the minor Coptic dialects, classical Greek, and the church-Arabic of medieval Coptic glosses.

Yara Nour el-Din — Greek-Egyptian bilingual editor. Born Alexandria 1989. PhD Heidelberg, 2017, thesis on Greek-demotic bilingual documents from the Tebtunis archive. Joined the journal in 2020. Handles the bilingual material that turns up at all four sites — Greek-Egyptian, Greek-Coptic, occasionally Greek-Aramaic — and writes the Greek paleographic apparatus that complements the editors' transcriptions of the Egyptian-language texts.

Bilal Sherif — research and digital edition editor. Born Aswan 1993. Trained in classical languages at Helwan University (2011–15) and then four years at the University of Cologne's digital-classics laboratory (2017–21) before returning to Aswan and joining the journal. Maintains the journal's digital-edition platform, the EpiDoc TEI-XML conversion process and the working relationships with the institutional digital-classics laboratories.

The administrator, Salma Iskander, has handled subscriptions, accounting, the office correspondence inbox and the Tuesday-Wednesday-Saturday opening hours since 2018. Salma does not write for the journal.

Cooperative governance.

The cooperative is governed by the five editors as an editorial board, with the administrator attending without voting rights. Major editorial decisions — admission of a new corpus or excavation project to the rota, change to the methodology document, change to the EpiDoc TEI-XML schema, acceptance of a new editor — require a four-of-five board vote. The chair role rotates between Mostafa, Hala and Father Tawadros on a three-year cycle; Mostafa holds the current term through December 2027.

Funding and editorial independence.

Reader subscriptions covered approximately fifty-four percent of revenue in 2025. The Mokhtar Foundation paleography grant — paid annually since 2017 under a renewable five-year agreement and dedicated specifically to supporting paleographic publication in the Egyptian languages — contributed thirty-three percent. The remaining thirteen percent came from occasional consultancy contracts the editors privately hold (Mostafa for the Egyptian Tourism Authority's epigraphic signage programme, Hala for a Cairo University demotic-teaching contract), all declared in the December transparency note. No university, museum, antiquities dealer, advocacy organisation or government department has funded the journal at any point in its ten-year history. Five sponsorship approaches have been declined since 2017, all from commercial antiquities-trade entities; each refusal is logged.

The Mokhtar Foundation is an Egyptian private foundation established in 2008 to support paleographic and codicological documentation; its grants are made on a publication-output basis and carry no editorial conditions.

The documentary stance.

The journal's editorial choice is documentary first, interpretive second. We publish transcriptions and paleographic apparatus; we do not write extended historical interpretation of the material we publish. The interpretive work is the responsibility of the institutional projects and of the wider scholarly community working from our editions. The position keeps the journal short (forty to sixty pages per quarter rather than the hundred-and-fifty-plus pages of a comparable academic journal) and keeps the editorial production cycle manageable for our small team.

What we publish — and what we do not.

We publish first-edition paleographic transcriptions of material from the four working corpora with the institutional director's written consent, the calibrated photographic plates, the paleographic apparatus, the corrections log, the methodology document, the digital-edition TEI-XML files, the December transparency note and the quarterly issue. We do not publish private-collection material, do not publish material with undocumented post-1970 provenance, do not publish anonymous-source readings, and do not publish photographs of identifiable institutional excavators without their explicit consent.

The Aswan office.

The office is the first floor above the Idris glassware shop on Sharia al-Sail in the Souk district. The street is busy in the morning souk hours and quiet from early afternoon. The office consists of three rooms: a reception room where visiting scholars are received, a working room with the photographic light bench and the editorial cross-reference desk, and an archive room with the bound back-issues since 2016 and the cooperative's reference library of approximately six hundred volumes on Egyptian paleography. Visiting researchers welcome by appointment Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. The office has tea on the small terrace overlooking the souk.

Visiting researchers.

Approximately twenty visiting researchers come through the Aswan office each year — primarily PhD students working on paleographic thesis topics, mid-career classicists working on edition projects that overlap with our corpora, and the occasional senior scholar coming through Aswan to consult the cooperative's photographic archive of items the institutional projects have not yet themselves photographed at our calibrated standard. The archive room is open during visits; tea is served on the terrace.

The cooperative's annual external audit.

Since 2022 the journal commissions an annual external audit of its editorial methodology by a rotating panel of two external paleographers — typically one specialist in the Egyptian-language scripts and one in the broader epigraphic-edition methodology of adjacent disciplines (Greek epigraphy, Aramaic paleography). The audit reviews the year's published editions against the methodology document, checks the corrections log for completeness, examines the institutional-consent records and verifies the financial transparency note against the cooperative's accounting. The audit panel publishes a brief external statement each March; the 2022 through 2025 statements have all been positive. The audit is an additional cost (approximately three percent of annual expenditure) that the cooperative considers worth the credibility benefit, particularly for an enterprise whose value depends on the academic community's trust in our paleographic readings.

Correspondence.

Write to [email protected] for any matter. Telephone Salma on +20 97 2438 906 during office hours. Postal correspondence to the Sharia al-Sail address. The journal reads every message and replies; the response time is normally three working days for routine matters and longer for paleographic-attribution questions which require the editor's verification against the corpus.