Trismegistos: An Interdisciplinary Platform for Ancient World Texts and Related Information

Abstract

Trismegistos (TM) is a KU Leuven coordinated metadata platform for the study of texts from the Ancient World. This article provides a survey of its development, from the roots in a prosopography of Ptolemaic Egypt to an all-encompassing database with information about texts from Egypt for the period from 800 BC to AD 800. The current technical setup is detailed in a next section, with special attention for the structure of the many interconnected relational databases. A final section presents the current expansion to include material from outside Egypt, particularly Latin (and to some extent also Greek) inscriptions, in the framework of the CIP-Europeana EAGLE project. It also discusses some potential technological innovations to facilitate data exchange in a linked Open Data environment. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.