The Oxyrhynchus Papyri

当挖掘者在开罗以南约200公里的al-Bahnasa挖掘时，他们发现了古代奥克西林库斯的垃圾堆，其中有50万份纸莎草书和文件碎片，大部分是希腊语。这个随机的档案记录了从亚历山大大帝到阿拉伯征服期间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，其中包括在中世纪全部或部分消失的古典希腊作家的作品：萨福的歌曲，米南德的喜剧，卡利马库斯的挽歌，在他们的时代都很有名。其余的包括公共和私人文件：法令、税收评估、纳税申报表、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，大部分时间跨度为公元前七个世纪，当时埃及是罗马和拜占庭帝国的一个省。这些材料的分类、破译和出版仍在继续，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消失的图书馆，这些图书馆最近出版了（例如）阿基洛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文学，书籍的历史和教育的发展。对于罗马历史学家来说，这些文件比文学资料更接近实际，而文学资料关注的是高层政治。官方日记记录了官员的日常活动。法庭记录显示罗马法和地方法同时存在。土地租赁和驴买卖暗示了通胀水平。私人信件说明了基层经济，家庭和朋友的网络，希腊语的现代形式。书籍和文献都记载了埃及基督教的历史：迫害和建立，非正统福音和教义冲突，个人对祈祷和护身符的奉献。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，因为它们对罗马和早期拜占庭世界的文化和政治史做出了特殊贡献。我们将出版早期莎草纸上的非正典福音书、希腊旧约和教父文本，这些文本体现了原始教会的阅读习惯和教义演变：其中包括希腊文和科普特文的广受欢迎的“黑马牧羊人”片段。我们已经确定了长期失传的作品和作者的文学文本，包括西蒙尼德斯的片段，以及不知名的喜剧、小说和历史学家的片段，比如《卡里贡和亚马逊女战士》和一位匿名的《亚历山大和他的继任者》；还有一些著名作家（修昔底德、阿波罗尼乌斯·罗迪乌斯），他们的作品可以通过我们收藏的早期副本得到改进。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。纪录片文本已经被选择来阐明埃及，它的显贵和它的人口，和皇帝和他的政权之间的关系。一个埃及的长官被指控腐败在哈德良皇帝面前；在庆祝帝国周年纪念日的游行队伍中，人们曾举着盾牌形的标语；阿皮恩家族档案中的进一步文件强调了拜占庭皇帝必须拉拢和控制的地方男爵。加上第一次组装的图画，从简单的涂鸦到绘本，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，《穿着黑靴子的天使》反映了基督教的肖像。帝国和古代晚期，在他们所有复杂的现实中，在奥克西林库斯的垃圾堆里留下了文字痕迹，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.