Oxyrhynchus Papyri

当挖掘者在开罗以南约200公里的al-Bahnasa挖掘时，他们发现了古代Oxylynchus的垃圾场，以及50万份纸莎草书和文件的碎片，其中大部分是希腊文的。这个随机的档案体现了从亚历山大大帝到阿拉伯征服的有效统治埃及的希腊殖民阶级。大约10%的纸莎草纸来自书籍，其中包括古希腊作家，他们的作品在中世纪全部或部分消失了：萨福之歌，梅南德的喜剧，卡利马库斯的挽歌，在他们的时代都很有名。其余的文件包括公共和私人文件：法令、税法、纳税申报单、人口普查表格、财产登记簿、销售、租赁、贷款、收据、遗嘱、婚姻、购物清单、家庭账户和许多私人信件，主要跨越公元前七个世纪，当时埃及是罗马和拜占庭帝国的一个省。从1898年开始的这份材料的分类、破译和出版工作至今仍在继续，为不同学科的学者提供这一独特的资源。古典文学历史学家可以进入消失的图书馆，那里最近产生了(例如)阿基洛库斯和西蒙尼德的诗歌；他们还可以研究阅读习惯和当地文学家，书的历史和教育史。对于这位罗马历史学家来说，这些文件比关注高层政治的文学来源更贴近实际。官方日记记录了官员的日常活动。法庭记录显示，罗马和当地法律是同居的。土地租赁和驴子销售暗示了通胀水平。私人信件展示了草根经济、家庭和朋友网络，希腊语采用了现代形式。书籍和文件都记录了埃及基督教：迫害和建立，异端福音书和他们的消除，个人在祈祷和护身符中的奉献。在我们项目的下一阶段，我们的目标是利用未出版的纸莎草纸对罗马和早期拜占庭世界的文化和政治史做出独特的贡献。我们将出版新约和未知福音书的早期纸莎草书，这些书例证了原始教会的阅读习惯和教义演变：其中，是小说《安德鲁福音》的片段。我们选择了失传已久的作品和作家的文学文本，比如阿尔西达马斯的《贫穷的赞美》或梅南德的《竖琴手》；除此之外，还有一些匿名畅销书，比如克里米亚的希腊殖民者与亚马逊人结盟的小说《卡利根》，或者是一部淫秽的哑剧，抄袭的手感如此庄严，看起来像是圣经。一组学校练习和解说词将介绍和记录省级精英的智力形成，以及一组诗文和地方文学作品。纪录片文本被选择来说明伟大的转变：罗马省埃及的创建和旧希腊主义与新帝国的强制共生；公元4世纪初的世界新秩序，以及新的省级贵族的崛起；基督教埃及及其对哈里发帝国的吸收。因此，在29世纪90年代的一系列请愿书中，一名妇女在皇帝重新配置该省的同时为正义而战；《文摘》的希腊文译本尽管查士丁尼年号被禁止，但仍在流传；一份报告显示，阿皮恩庄园支付省长雇用的所有工作人员；另一份报告揭示了伊斯兰征服后不久奥瑟林丘斯的新财政区。我们还将协调埃及语(德米特语和科普特语)和阿拉伯语文本的工作，这些文本让他们自己瞥见了一个多元文化的社会。帝国和晚期古代，在Oxylynchus的垃圾场留下了文件痕迹，这是该项目将遵循的路线。

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-codes, 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, begun in 1898, still continues as a project that makes this unique resource available to 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 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, heretical gospels and their elimination, personal devotion in prayers and amulets.In the next phase of our project we aim to exploit unpublished papyri for their unique contribution to the cultural and political history of the Roman and early Byzantine world. We will publish early papyri of the New Testament and of unknown gospels, which exemplify the reading habits and doctrinal evolution of the primitive church: among them, a fragment of the novelistic 'Gospel of Andrew'. We have selected literary texts of works and authors long lost, such as Alcidamas' 'Praise of Poverty' or Menander's 'Harpist'; alongside these, anonymous bestsellers such as the novel 'Kalligone', in which the Greek colonists of the Crimea ally themselves with the Amazons, or an obscene mime copied in a hand so stately that it looks like Scripture. A group of school exercises and commentaries will inform and document the intellectual formation of the provincial elite, and a group of verse-texts the local literary production. Documentary texts have been chosen to illuminate the great transitions: the creation of the Roman province of Egypt and the enforced symbiosis of old Hellenism with the new Empire; the new world order of the early fourth century AD, and the rise of the new provincial nobility; Christian Egypt and its absorption into the empire of the Caliphs. So, in a series of petitions of the 290s, a woman struggles for justice while Emperors reconfigure the province; a Greek translation of the Digest circulates in spite of Justinian's prohibition; an account shows the Apion estate paying all staff in the employ of the provincial governor; another account reveals the new fiscal districts of Oxyrhynchus shortly after the Islamic conquest. We will also coordinate work on texts in Egyptian (Demotic and Coptic) and Arabic, which give their own glimpse of a multicultural society.Empire and Late Antiquity, in all their complexity, have left a paper-trail in the dumps of Oxyrhynchus, and this is the trail that the project will be following.