• By default, all papyri are shown. You can start a search by filtering the database using the filters (below).
• If your search returns 0 papyri, it means that the parameters you have selected cannot be combined. Try removing one of them!
• It is recommended to filter one parameter at a time (e.g. first select one or more document type, and later refine your search by selecting a subtype).
• If you see the IIIF or Figshare logo, it means that you will be able to see the papyrus image next to the text.

• The keyword search is a full-text search of our metadata. It includes the papyrus title, identifiers such as Trismegistos numbers, subjects and place names.
• The place names come from HGV metadata and are generally in German (e.g. Tebtynis instead of Tebtunis).
• The subjects are derived from HGV subjects, which you can see in papyri.info among the HGV metadata, under the heading 'Subjects'. They are available in English and can be used to find documents that are known under different labels. Example: searching for warrant, order to arrest or summons will return all the documents corresponding to these terms.
• Operators: it is possible to use operators like OR, NOT or the * wildcard to make more complex searches. Here are some examples:
  1. BGU Arsinoites is the equivalent of searching BGU AND Arsinoites, since AND is the default operator.
  2. BGU NOT Arsinoites will find BGU papyri not originating from the Arsinoite Nome. Note that you cannot use the NOT operator alone! It is not possible to search for NOT Arsinoites, however you could search for g* NOT Arsinoites which is roughly equivalent since all papyri have the word "grammateus" in their metadata.
  3. BGU OR P.Oxy will find either BGU or P.Oxy. papyri.
  4. oxy* will find papyri with a provenance of Oxyrhynchos, Oxyrhynchos?, Oxyrhynchites, Oxyrhyncha, etc. The wildcard replaces 0 or more characters.

• The Types, Subtypes and Variations of documents are further described in the Typology. See the Descriptions pages.
• You can search papyri that contain a particular text section or a combination of them (e.g. papyri that have both a date and a salutation).
• We have divided papyri in three possible shapes: horizontal, vertical, and squarish.
• Fibres are vertical or horizontal, or mixed. Mixed fibres papyri have a part of horizontal and a part of vertical fibres, for instance due to two sheets pasted together.

Provenance and date are from the HGV data on papyri.info, encoded in EpiDoc XML.

• The Provenance is the Nome when available, or a more precise place name depending on the precision of the HGV metadata.
  
  Technical note
  the Nome is usually encoded with a <provenance> element. However, not all papyri have provenance element in their metadata. When there is no <provenance> element, the Nome may also be extracted from <origPlace>, if it is present in parenthesis. If the Nome cannot be safely deduced, then the content of <origPlace> is used.
• The Date can be filtered by selecting a range of centuries, within the corpus bounds (Ptolemaic and Roman period). The search is loose, meaning that the date range of a document must overlap with the selected range. Papyri that have an incomplete range, i.e. only one terminus post or ante quem, are given a range of 50 years before/after their terminus.
  When there are multiple datations for one papyrus, we consider only the first one. For a precise datation, please check HGV.