Abstract
Published in 1925 by H.I. Bell and W.E. Crum, the Greek-Coptic glossary compiled or recopied by Dioscorus, a notary and poet from the village of Aphrodité (Middle Egypt) in the 6th century CE, contains over four hundred lemmas classified according to eleven themes (general terms, body parts, adjectives referring to blindness, topography, animal world, rivers and fish, agriculture, other trades, Dionysus and his cult, adjectives referring to man, miscellaneous). Despite its richness, this glossary has, with a few rare exceptions, not yet been the subject of in-depth exegesis, and in view of the progress made in papyrology and coptology over the last century or so, it needs to be re-examined afresh and re-edited in its entirety. As part of the preparation of a new edition by myself (in collaboration with N. Carlig), I will focus here on the literary texts, particularly poetry, which, directly or via glossographic material available elsewhere, served as Dioscore's source. After presenting the formal aspects and the layout of the lemmas on the support, I propose to examine with the audience a few words relating to agriculture and the animal world, comparing the entries with data from poetic texts and lexicons. In so doing, I'll be looking at the context of the glossary's production and use, which may have had a scholastic purpose.
