The paleography toolkit — what sits on the editor's reference shelf and on the photographic bench.

The printed reference shelf.

Every editor at the journal works against a shared printed reference shelf in the Aswan archive room. The shelf is organised by script and period. Hieratic shelf: Möller's Hieratische Paläographie (1909–36, three volumes) as the foundational reference; Černý-Posener for the Twentieth Dynasty material; Posener-Krieger's Archives of the Funerary Temple of Neferirkare-Kakai for the Fifth-Dynasty hieratic; recent updates from the Vienna Hieratic Paleography Project and the Cologne Papyrology archive. Demotic shelf: Erichsen's Demotisches Glossar and his volumes on individual demotic narrative texts; Cenival's contracts work; the Berkeley Tebtunis archive's published editions; Lüddeckens's marriage-contract corpus. Coptic shelf: Crum's Coptic Dictionary (always the first reference for any Coptic reading); the Layton grammar; the published Wadi al-Natrun monastic-library editions; the Schenoute corpus from White Monastery. Greek-Egyptian shelf: the Catalogue des papyrus grecs et démotiques; the Berichtigungsliste; the standard Egyptian-papyrology references.

The photographic workflow.

The photographic bench at the Aswan office produces every published plate under a calibrated standard developed by Bilal Sherif in 2017 and revised twice (2019 and 2024). The current rig uses a Nikon D850 mounted on a copy stand with two LED panels positioned for the visible-light pass and a separate raking-light source at low angle for the raking-light pass. Every photograph includes the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport reference card; the cards have been used since 2016 to preserve plate-to-plate consistency across the journal's archive. Post-production runs in Capture One with a fixed colour-management profile; the published plates are exported as colour-managed JPEG at 1800 pixels longest dimension with the IIIF manifest generated automatically.

The EpiDoc TEI-XML toolchain.

The digital-edition workflow follows the EpiDoc 9.4 community standard. Bilal Sherif's toolchain converts the editor's working transcription (Unicode plain text with diplomatic conventions) into TEI-XML with the EpiDoc-prescribed element structure. The conversion is partly automated (the line-break and apparatus mark-up) and partly manual (the lemmatised normalisation and the cross-references to other published material). Every TEI-XML file is schema-validated against the EpiDoc DTD before publication. The XML files are released alongside the PDF issue under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

The corpus-search platform.

The journal's published archive is searchable through a small internal search platform that Bilal maintains. The platform indexes every transcription by character (across the four scripts), by lemmatised normalised reading, by paleographic feature, by institutional inventory number and by date range. The platform is accessible to subscribers through the journal's reader portal and to non-subscribers through a limited public search interface. The platform's database contains approximately one hundred and twelve thousand lemmatised entries across the journal's archive.

The unique-character workflow.

Each of the four ancient scripts the journal handles requires specific Unicode handling. Hieratic is transliterated to the standard Egyptian Latin transliteration (with the ALA-LC special characters) for readability; the original signs are reproduced in the photographic plate rather than in the running text. Demotic follows the same convention with the additional demotic-specific transliteration characters. Coptic uses the full Unicode Coptic block (U+2C80–U+2CFF) with the dialectal markers for Sahidic, Bohairic and the minor dialects. Greek uses standard polytonic Greek (U+0370–U+03FF + U+1F00–U+1FFF) with critical-sign mark-up.

Why we publish the tools openly.

The editorial board's view is that the paleographic tools we use should be documented openly so that any reader can evaluate the editorial chain back from a published reading to the working method that produced it. The discipline of paleography is built on intersubjective verification — the cumulative trust that a community of scholars places in each other's readings — and that trust depends on the editorial method being scrutable. Where the toolkit is opaque or proprietary, the trust collapses. The journal therefore publishes the photographic-bench specifications, the reference shelf, the EpiDoc TEI-XML toolchain and the corpus-search platform openly. The paleographic-tools document is not the kind of operational record that the typical journal publishes openly; we do, deliberately, because the documentary stance of the journal requires it.

For the methodology that produces the editions these tools support, see the methodology page. The EpiDoc TEI-XML standards document covers the digital workflow in more depth. The 2025 finds summary includes the year's new material processed through this toolkit.