In memoriam: Prof.dr. Klaas Anthony Worp (1943-2026)
Emeritus professor Klaas Worp was professor of Papyrology at Leiden University and the Leiden Papyrological Institute from 2002 to 2008.
Klaas Worp obtained his PhD cum laude at the University of Amsterdam in 1972 with a dissertation entitled Fünfzehn Wiener Papyri, subsequently published as Einige Wiener Papyri (Amsterdam 1972). In the same year, he began as an assistant professor, and later associate professor, in Papyrology at the University of Amsterdam. During his career, he published thousands of new editions of previously unpublished papyrus texts from collections around the world, such as the papyrus collections of the Abbey of Montserrat (Spain) and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, USA), but also from collections in the Netherlands, such as the Greek papyri and ostraca in the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and a special new edition of a Roman wax tablet found in Tolsum in Friesland.
From 1992, he was associated with the excavation of the Dakleh Oasis Project in Ismant el-Kharab (ancient Kellis) in the Western Desert of Egypt. He published both Greek documentary (Greek Papyri from Kellis, 1995) and literary papyri (Kellis Literary Texts, vol. 1, 1995 and vol. 2, 2007), wooden tablets (The Kellis Isocrates Codex, 1997) and ostraca (Greek Ostraka from Kellis, 2004) found at these excavations.
He had a particular interest in chronology, and the handbook Chronological Systems of Byzantine Egypt (1978, 2nd edition 2004), co-authored with Roger Bagnall (New York University), remains the standard work for dating in texts from the Byzantine period.
Already during his career, his exceptional productivity and significant contribution to the field of papyrology were highly appreciated. He became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences in 2001. And for his 65th birthday in 2008, he was presented with a Festschrift entitled Sixty-Five Papyrological Texts, containing 65 contributions by fellow papyrologists from all over the world.
In 2002, through the Leiden University Fund, he was given the opportunity to become Professor of Papyrology at Leiden University. In his inaugural lecture ‘Watersheds in Papyrology’, delivered on September 19, 2003, he describes the growth of papyrology into a discipline of its own and concludes his argument with the following words:
“The papyri are, I hope to have demonstrated, a rich and enriching source of new knowledge and science, upon the practice and transmission of which, to the best of my knowledge, a University is founded and from which it derives its right to exist as such. In my view, papyrology is hardly a profession, but rather a calling, and one to which a touch of addiction is not entirely alien. So be it: here stands a papyrologist; he cannot help it…”
Klaas Worp was a papyrologist par excellence, and his legacy to the field of papyrology is not to be underestimated. He will be missed by many colleagues within and outside of Leiden.
On behalf of the Leiden Papyrological Institute,
Joanne Stolk