Duration: 2010 to 2022

After Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 B.C. Alexander the Great had conquered Egypt and his former general Ptolemy had founded the Ptolemaic dynasty in 306 B.C., a massive temple-building program began throughout the country, the roots of which may date back as far as the 30th Dynasty (380–342 B.C.) and which was to continue into the third century A.D.

The inscriptions in these late temples—which are sometimes difficult to decipher due to their expanded and highly specialized hieroglyphic system—contain extensive, diverse, and often unique information about cultic and festive events, the religious topography of the Nile Valley, myths and groups of gods, architectural history, and spatial functions—and are therefore rightly described by some Egyptologists as “libraries of stone.”

In addition to numerous valuable studies on individual topics, what has been lacking until now, in particular, is a systematic overview of the core content, internal interconnections, design patterns, and issues related to the history of transmission of the meticulously composed Ptolemaic-Roman temple decoration. A key objective of the Heidelberg Academy project was to address this gap through a step-by-step, comprehensive cataloging of the content and structure of Greco-Roman temple inscriptions. Linked to this was the question of whether the temples reveal a definitive corpus of text genres that constitutes a kind of canon for the Egyptian religion.

Although the project focused primarily on Ptolemaic and Roman temple texts, this task also allowed it to serve as a bridge to other areas of Egyptology: The analysis of the textual tradition helped to integrate these temple texts into the discipline to a far greater extent than had previously been the case, transforming them from a specialized field into an integral part of Egyptology. The research project’s work was successfully completed on December 31, 2022.