How the editions are produced, and the full corpus index.

The corpus index.

Corpus	Excavation project	Lead editor	Editions filed	Cadence
Elephantine ostraca	German Archaeological Institute, Elephantine	Mostafa el-Kanawati	168	Spring + autumn quarters
Hieratic administrative	Multiple — Elephantine + Tebtunis	Mostafa el-Kanawati	74	Year-round
Demotic narrative papyri	Tebtunis temple archive, Berkeley	Hala Habashy	92	Quarterly
Coptic monastic letters	Wadi al-Natrun, Coptic Studies Institute	Father Tawadros Aziz	108	Quarterly
Greek-Egyptian bilingual	Abu Sir el-Meleq, Polish CMA	Yara Nour el-Din	45	As material arrives
Annual finds summary	All four projects	Mostafa el-Kanawati	10 annual reports	One per year
Paleography tools	Working document	Bilal Sherif	Revised annually	March revision
EpiDoc TEI-XML standards	Digital-edition framework	Bilal Sherif	Versioned	September revision

The four-pass edition cycle.

Every published edition passes through a documented four-stage process. The cycle takes between twelve and forty-five working days from initial field reading to publication, depending on the difficulty of the text and the institutional consent timing.

Pass one — initial field reading. The relevant lead editor (Mostafa for hieratic, Hala for demotic, Father Tawadros for Coptic, Yara for Greek-Egyptian bilingual) visits the excavation house and produces the initial reading in the field. The reading is recorded in the editor's working notebook with the excavation project's institutional record number cross-referenced against our internal inventory number. The notebook reading is the canonical primary source; everything else derives from it.

Pass two — calibrated photographic plate. Bilal Sherif's photographic standard is applied to every item: two passes (visible light and raking light) under a Pantone colour-reference card visible in the frame. The raking-light plate often reveals damaged-ink readings that the visible-light photograph misses. Photographic files are stored as 16-bit TIFF at the camera's full resolution and published as colour-managed JPEG at standardised sizes.

Pass three — Aswan transcription and paleographic apparatus. The lead editor produces the full transcription in the Aswan office, with the paleographic apparatus comparing the hands and orthography against the published reference corpora. The apparatus is the slowest stage — three to ten working days per item — because the comparison must consult the editor's working notes, the published reference catalogues (Möller for hieratic, Erichsen-Cenival for demotic, Crum for Coptic), and the recently published editions in related corpora.

Pass four — peer review and institutional sign-off. The transcription and apparatus go to a second editor with adjacent corpus expertise (typically Hala reviews Mostafa's hieratic work and vice versa; Father Tawadros and Yara cross-review where the material involves both Coptic and Greek). The reviewed edition then goes to the institutional excavation project director for written sign-off. The institutional director has up to twenty-one days to flag any concern; in practice the sign-off arrives within seven to ten days for routine material and within fourteen for items where the institutional team holds a strong reading.

The institutional consent process.

The journal publishes material from active excavations only with the institutional project director's written consent. The consent process has three stages. Stage one — annual master agreement. Each year the cooperative renews a master agreement with each of the four working projects, setting out the rights and obligations on both sides. The current agreements run through 2027 with renewal discussions in late 2026. Stage two — quarterly batch consent. Each quarter the relevant lead editor sends the project director a list of proposed publications for that quarter's issue. The director has seven days to flag any item they wish to withhold; withheld items remain unpublished. Stage three — per-item sign-off. The final pre-publication step is the per-item sign-off described in pass four above.

The EpiDoc TEI-XML digital edition.

Every published edition is also released as a structured EpiDoc TEI-XML file conforming to the EpiDoc 9.4 community schema. The XML edition includes the full diplomatic transcription with line breaks, the lemmatised normalised reading, the paleographic apparatus marked up as TEI critical-apparatus elements, the institutional inventory and provenance metadata, and the calibrated photographic plates linked by IIIF manifest. The TEI-XML files are released under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, free for academic use with citation. Bilal Sherif maintains the conversion workflow and the schema-validation cycle. The XML files are downloadable from the journal's open archive page; subscribers receive them by email with the quarterly issue.

The corrections log.

Corrections to published editions are issued within thirty days of confirmation and recorded in the public corrections log. The log has been continuously maintained since 2016 and currently carries seventy-two entries. Each correction includes the affected edition identifier, the original reading, the corrected reading, the source citation supporting the correction, and the editor's brief note. About forty percent of corrections come from peer-reviewers in the wider scholarly community; thirty percent from the institutional excavation projects after their own academic publication is in late draft; thirty percent from our own internal review cycle.

The corrections log.

Corrections to published editions are issued within thirty days of confirmation and recorded in the public corrections log, continuously maintained since 2016. Seventy-two entries currently. About forty percent come from peer-reviewers in the wider scholarly community; thirty percent from the institutional excavation projects after their own academic publication enters late draft; thirty percent from our own internal review cycle. The corrections log is the journal's most-consulted single archive document by visiting researchers.

Languages of the editorial team and accepted correspondence languages.

The editorial team between them reads classical Egyptian, hieratic, demotic, Coptic (Sahidic, Bohairic and the minor dialects), classical Greek, modern Greek, classical Arabic, modern Standard Arabic, German, French and English. We accept correspondence routinely in English, Arabic, French and German, and on a best-effort basis in Italian, Spanish, modern Greek and Russian.

The annual external audit of methodology.

Since 2022 the journal commissions an annual external audit conducted by a rotating panel of two external paleographers — typically one Egyptian-script specialist and one from an adjacent epigraphic discipline. The audit reviews the year's published editions against the methodology document, checks the corrections log, examines the institutional-consent records and verifies the December transparency note. The audit panel publishes a brief external statement each March; the 2022 to 2025 statements have all been positive. The audit costs approximately three percent of annual expenditure and the cooperative considers it essential to the journal's credibility.

External commissioned readings.

The journal occasionally accepts external commissioned readings — typically from university museums asking for a paleographic reading of material in their own collection that does not fall under one of the four working corpora. The commission must satisfy the journal's standard provenance requirements (documented pre-1970 provenance or institutional-collection record). Fees are set at three hundred euros for a single item or eight hundred euros for a group of up to six items; the fee covers the four-pass edition cycle and includes the published transcription in the next quarterly issue with the museum's consent. Twelve such commissions have been completed since 2018.

The cooperation framework with Egyptian institutions.

Beyond the four working excavation partnerships, the journal maintains informal cooperative relationships with three Egyptian academic institutions whose work overlaps with our publication scope. The Coptic Studies Institute in Cairo (already named as the institutional director of the Wadi al-Natrun corpus) provides occasional referee support for Coptic editions where Father Tawadros wants a second opinion outside the editorial board. The American University in Cairo's Egyptology programme has hosted three of our editors as visiting teachers since 2019 and several of their MA students have come through the Aswan office as visiting researchers. Cairo University's classical-languages department has occasionally referred private-collection enquiries to us that turned out to fit institutional partnerships we hold; we route the enquirer to the relevant institutional director rather than handle the enquiry ourselves. None of the three relationships involves funding or formal editorial influence; they are working academic relationships of the kind that develop in any scholarly field, and we document them in the December transparency note for completeness.

Reader questions on methodology.