The Oxyrhynchus Papyri

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When excavators dug al-Bahnasa, some 200 km south of Cairo, they found the rubbish dumps of ancient Oxyrhynchus, with 500,000 fragments of papyrus books and documents, mostly in Greek. This random archive materializes the Greek colonial class which effectively governed Egypt from Alexander the Great to the Arab conquest. About 10% of the papyri come from books, among them classical Greek authors whose work disappeared in whole or part during the Middle Ages: the songs of Sappho, the comedies of Menander, the elegies of Callimachus, all famous in their time. The remainder comprises public and private documents: edicts, tax-assessments, tax-returns, census-forms, property-registers, sales, leases, loans, receipts, wills, marriages, shopping-lists, household accounts and many private letters, spanning mostly the first seven centuries AD, when Egypt was a province of the Roman and Byzantine Empires. The sorting, decipherment and publication of this material continues, and the results constitute a unique resource for scholars in various disciplines. Historians of classical literature get access to vanished libraries, which have recently yielded (for example) poems by Archilochus and Simonides; they can also study reading-habits and local litterateurs, the history of the book and the development of education. For the Roman historian, the documents come much closer to the ground than the literary sources, which focus on high politics. Official diaries record the day-to-day activity of officials. Court records show the cohabitation of Roman and local law. Land-leases and donkey-sales hint at levels of inflation. Private letters illustrate the grass-roots economy, the networks of family and friends, the Greek language assuming its modern form. Both books and documents chronicle Egyptian Christianity: persecution and establishment, uncanonical gospels and doctrinal strife, personal devotion in prayers and amulets. In this new phase of the project we propose to publish 300 unedited papyri, chosen for their special contribution to the cultural and political history of the Roman and early Byzantine world. We will publish early papyri of an uncanonical Gospel, of the Greek Old Testament and of patristic texts, which exemplify the reading habits and doctrinal evolution of the primitive church: among them, fragments in Greek and in Coptic of the widely popular 'Shepherd of Hermas'. We have identified literary texts of works and authors long lost, to include fragments of Simonides and of unknown comedies, novels and historians, like 'Kalligone and the Amazons' and an anonymous 'Alexander and his successors'; and also of known authors (Thucydides, Apollonius Rhodius) whose text can be improved by the very early copies in our collection. A group of school exercises and grammars will document the intellectual formation of the provincial elite, from elementary schooling to oratorical mastery. Documentary texts have been chosen to illuminate the relations between Egypt, its grandees and its population, and the Emperor and his regime. So, a Prefect of Egypt stands accused of corruption before the Emperor Hadrian; a shield-shaped placard was once carried in procession to celebrate an imperial anniversary; further papers from the archives of the Apion family highlight the local barons whom Byzantine Emperors had to coopt and control. Add the drawings, now assembled for the first time, which range from simple doodles to illustrated books, from architectural blueprints to textile-designs: an Infant Horus in the Primal Egg illustrates Greco-Egyptian religion, an Angel with Black Boots reflects Christian iconography. Empire and Late Antiquity, in all their complex reality, have left a paper-trail in the dumps of Oxyrhynchus, and this is the trail that our project will be following.