The section Egypt and Eastern Mediterranean gathers a selection of documentary letters (written on papyri and ostraka) from the North-African (Africa Proconsularis and Aegyptus) and Near-East (Palestine and Syria) areas. There are 219 letters, dating between the 1st century BC and the 6th century AD.
The database, searchable through the Research page, provides both linguistic and extra-linguistic information concerning the texts (for the editions in use, cf. The Project). As for the other sections of CLaSSES, all the forms diverging from the Classical norm have been annotated. These non-Classical forms have been classified according to the type of variation encountered, which may involve orthography (and presumably also phonetics and phonology) and also morphology. In particular, the linguistic phenomena annotated concern vocalism, consonantism and morphophonology.
It is also possible to search the lemmas found in this section in other textual and lexical sources, thanks to the linking to LiLa – Knowledge Base of Interoperable Linguistic Resources for Latin, a collection of both lexical and textual resources for Latin (corpora, lexica, ontologies, dictionaries, thesauri) made interoperable following the principles of the Linked Data paradigm.
As for extra-linguistic information, epistolary genre has been annotated, adopting the distinction between formal (i.e. public) and informal letters (i.e. private letters of information).
For further details concerning the annotation criteria, see the User Guide and Documentation.