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Triumph for Berlin scientist Verena Lepper: 1.5 million euros ERC Starting Grant for research on the Egyptian Museum's papyrus collection on the Nile island of Elephantine
Press release from 12/30/2014
The Berlin Egyptologist and Orientalist Prof Dr Verena Lepper has received one of the most important awards in the world of research, the ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). She now has access to funding for her research project "Localising 4000 Years of Cultural History. Texts and Scripts from Elephantine Island in Egypt" over the next five years with a total of 1.5 million euros. Lepper has been Curator of Egyptian and Oriental Papyri at the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection of the National Museums in Berlin since 2008, where her research project is also based.
Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, says: "Only ten per cent of applicants are successful with the ERC Starting Grant. Prof Lepper has prevailed among a large number of highly qualified competitors, which is nothing less than a triumph. The fact that she has also received the full amount of funding she applied for is an extraordinary achievement for which I would like to congratulate her most sincerely. For the SPK, it is also confirmation that it enjoys a high reputation and international esteem as a non-university research institution."
Michael Eissenhauer, Director General of the National Museums in Berlin, added: "I congratulate Prof Lepper on this great success! This project is an important step for the further development of the research profile of the National Museums in Berlin." Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, President of the ERC, wrote: "I am confident that this grant will help you to continue your research at the highest possible level, and to achieve ground-breaking results in the true spirit of the ERC."
The aim of Verena Lepper's research project is to investigate the 4000-year cultural history of the Egyptian Nile island of Elephantine. Hardly any other Egyptian settlement is so well documented: Numerous written records from the period from the Old Kingdom to after the Arab conquest have survived to this day. They are written in around ten different languages and scripts, including hieroglyphics, hieratic, demotic, Aramaic, Greek, Coptic and Arabic, partly due to the multi-ethnic and multi-religious composition of the local population. These several thousand papyri and manuscripts from Elephantine are now preserved in over 60 institutions in and outside Europe. Around 80 per cent of them have not yet been researched and published.
Verena Lepper speaks 15 languages, including all those in which texts were written at Elephantine. Born in the Rhineland in 1973, she studied Egyptology, Semitic Studies and Christian Oriental Studies in Bonn, Cologne, Tübingen and Oxford (UK) and completed her doctorate in Egyptology and Semitic Studies at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn and Harvard University (USA). Before working as a curator at the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. She has been teaching Egyptology at Freie Universität Berlin since 2011 and has held an honorary professorship at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since 2013.
Verena Lepper has been involved with Elephantine since her studies and in various projects. Most recently, from 2012 to 2014, she headed the project "The Egyptian and Oriental 'Rubensohn Library' from Elephantine" at the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection in Berlin, which was funded by the Minister of State for Culture, Prof. Monika Grütters, and as part of which she digitised the papyri from Elephantine that had already been catalogued in Berlin and made them accessible to international researchers.
Thanks to the ERC Starting Grant, Verena Lepper can now continue her Elephantine research with a team of 10 people. She has chosen the SPK with its Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection as her hosting institution. Alongside the Louvre in Paris, the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, it is home to the world's largest collection of papyri from Elephantine. Most of the documents that came to Berlin between 1906 and 1908 have not yet been catalogued and very few of them have been researched. As part of the project, Verena Lepper is pursuing an interdisciplinary approach to making the papyri accessible: the folded and rolled documents are also to be made legible using scientific methods. With the support of a physicist and a mathematician and using, for example, a computer tomograph, a method is being developed that allows a virtual reconstruction of the papyri without physically unfolding them. The digital cataloguing of the papyri is also a central prerequisite for the planned international "Papyrus Puzzle". The aim is to digitally assemble documents whose parts are currently located in different places. At the same time, questions about the content of the texts will be addressed as part of the project, following a global historical approach: These include, for example, everyday life, family, identity or multiculturalism.
