The Oxyrhynchus Papyri

当挖掘者挖掘开罗以南约200公里的al-Bahnasa时，他们发现了古代Oxyrhynchus的垃圾堆，其中有50万张纸莎草书和文件的碎片，大部分是希腊文。这个随机的档案体现了希腊殖民阶级有效地统治埃及从亚历山大大帝到阿拉伯征服。大约10%的纸莎草纸来自书籍，其中包括古典希腊作家，他们的作品在中世纪全部或部分消失：萨福的歌曲，米南德的喜剧，卡利马科斯的挽歌，在他们的时代都很有名。其余的包括公共和私人文件：法令、税收评估、纳税申报、人口普查表格、财产登记、销售、租赁、贷款、收据、遗嘱、婚姻、购物清单、家庭账目和许多私人信件，主要跨越公元前七个世纪，当时埃及是罗马帝国和拜占庭帝国的一个省。 对这些材料的整理、解读和出版仍在继续，其结果构成了各学科学者的独特资源。古典文学的历史学家可以进入已经消失的图书馆，这些图书馆最近出版了（例如）阿尔基罗库斯和西蒙尼德斯的诗歌;他们还可以研究阅读习惯和当地的文学，书籍的历史和教育的发展。对于罗马历史学家来说，文献比文学资料更接近地面，后者关注高层政治。官员日记记录官员的日常活动。法庭记录显示罗马法和地方法共存。土地租赁和驴子买卖暗示着通货膨胀的水平。私人信件说明了草根经济，家庭和朋友的网络，希腊语呈现出现代形式。这两本书和文件编年史埃及基督教：迫害和建立，不规范的福音和教义的冲突，个人奉献的祈祷和护身符。在这个项目的新阶段，我们建议出版300份未经编辑的纸莎草纸，选择它们对罗马和早期拜占庭世界的文化和政治历史的特殊贡献。我们将出版早期的纸莎草纸，其中包括一本非经典福音书、希腊旧约和教父文本，这些文本描述了原始教会的阅读习惯和教义演变：其中包括广受欢迎的“赫马斯牧羊人”的希腊文和科普特文片段。我们已经确定了作品和作者的文学文本早已消失，包括西蒙尼德斯和未知的喜剧，小说和历史学家的片段，如“卡利戈尼和亚马逊人”和一个匿名的“亚历山大和他的继任者”;也是已知的作家（修昔底德，阿波罗尼乌斯Rhodius），其文本可以通过我们收藏的早期副本进行改进。一组学校练习和语法将记录省级精英的智力形成，从小学教育到演讲掌握。纪录片文本已被选中，以阐明埃及，其显贵和人口，皇帝和他的政权之间的关系。因此，一位埃及省长在哈德良皇帝面前被指控腐败;一个盾牌形状的标语牌曾经在庆祝帝国周年纪念日的游行中被携带;阿皮翁家族档案中的更多文件突出了拜占庭皇帝不得不拉拢和控制的当地男爵。添加图纸，现在第一次组装，从简单的涂鸦到插图书籍，从建筑蓝图到纺织品设计：原始蛋中的婴儿荷鲁斯说明了希腊-埃及宗教，一个穿黑靴子的天使反映了基督教的肖像。帝国和古代晚期，在其所有复杂的现实中，在Oxyrhynchus的垃圾堆中留下了一条书面线索，这就是我们的项目将遵循的线索。

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.