On Friday 6 October 2017, Paola Buzi has had a meeting in the Egyptian Museum, Turin, with Susanne Toepfer (responsible for the materials preserved in the papiroteca of the Museum), Ira Rabin, physiscist and well-known specialist of the analysis of ancient inks (Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und –prüfung, Berlin) and Myriam Krutzsch, chemist and conservator of papyri (Neues Museum, Berlin). Tea Ghigo, PhD student in cotutelle beween the Universities of Hamburg and Sapienza, under the supervision of Ira Rabin and Paola Buzi, was also present.
The aim of the meeting was evaluating and planning archaeometric analyses of the inks and papyri of the Coptic codices preserved in the Museum that are studied by the PAThs project as a "case study".
The first results were soon obtained: thanks to the use of a Dino-Lite Digital Microscope, it turned out that the scribes of the Coptic codices of Turin made use of mixed inks (carbon and iron-gall inks). Future analyses will allow to determine more precisely the exact composition of these inks and, in order to understand the provenance of both the ingredients of the inks and of the writing supports.