TLS on Papyri

on Papyri

Roger S. B a g n a l l , e d i t o r THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF PAPYROLOGY 688pp. Oxford University Press. £85 (US $150).

978 0 19 517838 8 Suppose you track down, by brilliant detective work, the personal papers of a famous writer, dead for 150 years, which have reposed, untouched by his heirs and by theirs, in a trunk in an attic in France. You are the first to remove the pins that he put in to hold the pages together. The stuff of fiction? Such things do happen.
Hundreds of pages from notebooks, extracts of literary works by others, batches of letters sent to him, drafts of letters he wrote, legal documents, deeds, share certificates, bills, receipts, advertisements, newspaper clippings, train timetables, jottings of ideas, account-books... you are able to study everything just in time, before it is sold at auction for large sums and dispersed all over the world. From such an archive much of a life can be reconstructed in more detail than he who lived it ever understood, and the biographies of hundreds whom he knew, from all walks of life, can be vividly illuminated.
To put the picture back together you can rely on meticulous French archives, organized courtesy of Napoleon. Everything is soluble once you learn which register to check, which box to order; the Paris archives burned in 1870, but persistence, published almanacs and local sources fill the gaps. Foreigners in the dossiers? Off to Aix, Brussels or Kew, where experts will help you (if they are still funded). At worst, you track down missing dates by scrubbing mossy tombstones.
All this even before the internet.
You could once have done much the same in the ancient world, and especially in bureaucratic Egypt. The life of the famous poet and librarian Callimachus? The city archives of his birthplace Cyrene, personnel records of the royal library in Alexandria where he was cataloguer, tax accounts, cadasters, property registers, notaries' papers, family archives - beyond a doubt, all these once existed, written on scrolls and well able to survive in the bone-dry climate. All are long since scattered or turned to ash as surely as his dear friend Heraclitus ("They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead"). What we do still have, what still survives the ravages of invasion, fire, damp, worms, and that mortal enemy of the past, a shortage of storage space (off-site repositories, in other words), is the stuff of papyrology - the study of records on perishable materials, notably papyrus (the early equivalent of paper), from the ancient and early medieval world, c500 bc to 800 ad.

read more The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology, edited by Roger S. Bagnall, is a wonderful volume - a celebration of a vast and important discipline written by experts drawn from every part of it. Such experts are all too few; indeed, none can now master every aspect of the field, which covers so many centuries and languages, from Demotic Egyptian and Aramaic to Greek, Latin, Coptic and Arabic, with finds ranging from Hadrian's Wall to Herculaneum, the Euphrates and even Afghanistan (where the ink from part of a lost dialogue by Aristotle survived by being transferred onto mudbrick).

Their skill and persistence must be admired. That nineteenth-century archive reflected the kinds of material that also survive from antiquity - literary texts and documents; we find holy books too, school exercises and magical spells. But the two situations differ vastly. The central state archives of the ancient world are entirely gone; so are nearly all those of local administrators and individual families, or at best they are scattered across continents in different collections. Their findspots are very often unrecorded; few come from well-documented archaeological excavations. Worse, nearly everything is horribly damaged by insects, damp or fire. It must be conserved: this book explains how (but gives disastrous advice on carbonized papyri, which must not be flattened lest their fibres be crushed and they turn to dust). It must be edited, using consistent, internationally agreed conventions. It must be translated if any but a few are to grasp its extraordinary interest. And it must be analysed, if we are to see its immense historical value, as both artefact in the history of writing and material for the study of past civilizations.

What have finds of papyri taught us so far? Over the last century, the "century of papyrology", we have recovered many major works of literature we would otherwise have lost: Gnostic gospels, Empedocles' account of the creation, mythological poems by Hesiod, Egyptian tales, Aristotle's Constitution of Athens, epigrams by Posidippus, Manichaean scriptures including the Life of Mani, poems by Callimachus and Herodas, heretical writings in Coptic, lyrics by Bacchylides and Pindar, Hyperides' Orations, unknown scenes from Menander, Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus - all have come to light in Egypt in the last hundred years or so. Greater or lesser works by great writers, unknown works by minor ones of whom we had hardly heard, all shed light on what was known before. Such finds refresh our knowledge of ancient thought at its highest. From the remnants of such books we can study ancient handwriting, and use it, in turn, to date otherwise undated texts - a hazardous but necessary art. We can see how and by whose agency (in fact, the early Christians') a great technological advance - the shift from roll to codex, what we now call a "book" - took place. (Going back to "scrolling" is not actually progress.) We can see what was read, and why literature survived or was lost. Homer's Iliad was always used in elementary school. Menander was popular reading for most of antiquity, but was ousted by Aristophanes when purer Greek needed to be taught in schools. We catch sight of some readers enjoying a rather illicit genre - the novel. We learn that circles of scholars shared books and readings even in the provincial Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus; some of them turn out to be known to history. Being learned was as fashionable then as it may be unfashionable now.

Then there are the archives, whether of a high official at Ptolemy's court (Zenon), village scribes, monks in the desert, soldiers in Iraq, a local magnate who writes Greek verses in his spare time, a family in Petra, or desperate Jewish insurgents found dead with their essential papers, though I missed any mention of the exciting Latin archive of the Sulpicii bankers of Puteoli, found in the 1950s near Pompeii and published by Giuseppe Camodeca. Such archives mattered more to their owners than the tattered books they sometimes used to wrap them in. Their reconstruction gives us vivid snapshots of particular times and places, and lets us fit into larger pictures the almost innumerable feuilles volantes that, for the present, lack any such context and are therefore even harder to interpret.

From this mass of material, scholars have patiently reconstructed the administrative and legal systems of Ptolemaic, Roman and early Byzantine Egypt. By developing ever larger data sets, they can study fascinating questions of ancient demography, social history, the status of women, economics, multilingualism or military organization, about which literary sources give little help. Computerized databases now enable papyrologists to find parallels and identify texts in ways that their predecessors could only have dreamt of. Banks of images posted on the internet allow the matching of fragments of the same papyrus that are now in, say, Cairo and Ann Arbor, or Oxford and Berlin.

This immense progress in our knowledge is laid out lucidly and presented in a very lively manner by the team of international contributors. The volume is well organized and well indexed; its contents document a great broadening in the scope of papyrology over the past fifty years. However, it is a pity that it does not include - as did its far slimmer predecessor, Eric Turner's Greek Papyri - a list of the sometimes arcane abbreviations given to different collections of papyri (and a single bibliography would have saved space).

There is also more to learn from the site where papyrology first began than the volume sometimes allows. For it began not, as some contributors myopically assume, in the 1880s, but in 1752, when what is still the only surviving library of pre-Christian texts from Graeco-Roman antiquity was found at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, buried, and so preserved, by the eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79. These papyri are carbonized, so the ink is black on a black background (sadly, readers can grasp the effect from many of the unburnt papyri illustrated in the Oxford Handbook, which are printed so darkly that they are just as illegible). They include books copied in Athens in the third century bc (copies of Epicurus and Metrodorus) to Augustan works like the famous Carmen de bello actiaco (a poem on the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium), of which I found more scraps last year. It consisted of some seventy Latin texts (documents, comedy, epic and oratory), nearly all unpublished, and a library of perhaps 800 rolls of Greek philosophical works, a number still unopened. This volume rightly mentions the hopes one has of using X-ray tomography to read these papyri without damaging them. Even the papyri that were damaged by being opened manually are yielding remarkable results from better microscopes and infrared imaging.

Such is the shortage of "Egyptian" papyrologists, as one contributor notes, and such the quantity of papyri, that it will take a thousand years to publish the backlog of texts that have already been found. The situation is similar at Herculaneum, where it now takes on average nine years to reconstruct a roll of 150-230 columns; three have been published, but dozens await study. And there are more still to excavate - and we would be irresponsible not to do so. For if the texts are left in the ground where we know they are, they face grave risks of destruction: in Egypt, from the rapidly rising water table and illicit digging; and at the Villa of the Papyri from the overdue eruption of Vesuvius, which buried the Villa with lava several times between ad 79 and 1754. We need both more papyri and more papyrologists, especially experts in Latin, Coptic, Arabic and ancient philosophy. May this fine volume help to conjure them forth.