Papyrology

Enrico Emanuele Prodi こてんのちょうせん Papyrology Papyrology Enrico Emanuele Prodi, University of Oxford [email protected] こてんのちょうせん 古典の挑戦 edd. Kasai Y. and V. Cazzato Tokyo: Chisen Shokan, 2021 pp. 215–242 So much of the literature of ancient Greece and Rome has been lost. Yet we have substantially more of it now than we did a century and a half ago. Despite additions from other sources (one need only think of the discovery of Galen’s lost treatise On Not Grieving in a Byzantine manuscript in 2005), most of these advances are due to finds of papyri in Egypt. The lyric poet Sappho was assigned 170 fragments in the last edition before the age of papyrology, curated by Theodor Bergk in 1883; the latest critical edition, published by Eva Maria Voigt in 1971, runs up to 225 – a deceptively low figure, given how frequently multiple fragments are numbered as 29(a), 29(b), 29(c), etc. – and it does not include the latest discoveries published in 2004 and 2014. The modern understanding of many other Greek poets has been revolutionised by papyrological discoveries: Callimachus, Bacchylides, Herodas, Posidippus… perhaps more than anyone the playwright Menander, whose comedies were hugely popular throughout antiquity but fell into oblivion in the early Middle Ages before being recovered on a large scale from the sands of Egypt. Texts of the greatest importance for historians have been discovered in papyri: Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians, to name but one. Historians of philosophy have an entire ancient library to play with (more on which anon). Latinists have caught some crumbs from the banquet, too: the most striking is probably a fragment – a small one, alas – from the elegies of Virgil’s friend Cornelius Gallus. Not that papyrological discoveries only concern previously unknown texts. Take the cornerstone of Greek literature, the Iliad: the most recent critical edition lists 1,545 papyri of the text, plus 142 of commentaries, dedicated lexica, and the like; the Odyssey is on 580 and 61 respectively. There are papyrus fragment of almost every Greek author that survived the Middle Ages, as well as many that did not; a fair few pieces of Latin, too (with the Aeneid topping the chart, of course, but also Cicero, Terence, Sallust…). In fact, one of the hidden favours that papyrology does to the study of ancient literature and its reception is to provide quantitative data about the popularity of different authors in Egypt between, roughly, the early Hellenistic period and Late Antiquity. But what is this all about? What is a papyrus, why are there so many Classical authors on papyrus, and what are all these Classical authors doing in Egypt? And how did this rediscovery of lost ancient literature come about? Let us proceed in order. Papyrus is made from the papyrus plant, cyperus papyrus, which is cultivated in Egypt and grows spontaneously in other marshy areas of Africa. A passage of Pliny the Elder (Natural History 13.74–82) provides the only surviving ancient account of papyrus-making, mostly confirmed by examination of surviving papyrus manuscripts. The plant’s tall, triangular stalk is cut lengthwise into strips, which are placed side by side to form a uniform layer; a second layer 1 Enrico Emanuele Prodi こてんのちょうせん Papyrology is superimposed, with the strips at right angles with the first. Still wet, the two layers are hammered together so as to produce one sheet, with the plant’s own juices providing the glue. The papyrus plant’s fibres remain visible in the finished papyrus – the less so the higher its quality– and this two-layered structure is why papyrus sheets always have horizontal fibres on one side and vertical on the other. After drying, sheets are pasted to each other to form a roll of the desired length. The roll – the papyrus book – is held in the right hand and unrolled with the left so that the text, with the lines arranged in vertical columns, can be read from left to right. Normally the text was written only on the inside of the papyrus, where the horizontal fibres are: it is easier to write along the horizontal fibres than across the vertical ones, and the roll is more elastic and less likely to crack if the horizontal fibres are on the inside and the vertical ones on the outside. The roll was the standard format of the papyrus book through most of antiquity, from Pharaonic times until the first few centuries AD. Then a new format took over: the codex, that is, the Western book as we know it, with pages written on both sides and a seam in the centre. It seems to have arisen as a format for notebooks and for pocket editions, being sturdier and easier to handle and capable of bearing twice as much text relative to surface; it was quickly adopted by Christian communities – almost all of the earliest surviving books with a Christian content are in codex format – and by the end of the fourth century AD it was used almost universally for older, pagan literature and other texts too. Papyrus was in use from at least the third millennium BC before being replaced, first by parchment, then by that new Chinese technology, paper. (In many European languages, English included, the word for ‘paper’ derives from ‘papyrus’.) Most of what we know of ancient Egyptian literature is preserved on papyrus, and this is probably what first comes to mind upon hearing the word ‘papyrus’. Yet when we talk of ‘papyrology’ we mean something else, largely distinct from Egyptology: namely, the study of papyrus manuscripts written between (give or take) the fourth century BC and the end of Classical antiquity. (As so often, disciplinary boundaries are quite arbitrary and not terribly helpful.) The greatest number of surviving papyri have been found in Egypt, but papyrus was the standard writing material in large areas of the ancient Mediterranean and further afield, and papyrus manuscripts have been found in Palestine, Mesopotamia, Greece, Italy, and on the coasts of the Black Sea. The languages found in papyri are correspondingly many: Egyptian in its different alphabets (hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic) and its later incarnation, Coptic; Greek; Latin; Syriac; a vast, understudied amount of material in Arabic; even one papyrus in Armenian, or rather, bilingual Greek-Armenian. (There are plenty of bilingual papyri, both handbooks for language learners and editions with facing translation, not to mention books written in one language and annotated in another: GreekLatin and Greek-Coptic are the most common pairings.) Given the remit of the volume and my own specialism, this chapter focuses on the Classical languages; for all intents and purposes this means Greek, which outnumbers Latin almost tenfold in the Egyptian material. But why all this Greek in Egypt? Alexander III of Macedon – ‘Alexander the Great’ – conquered Egypt from the Persian empire in 332 BC. At his death nine years later, the country become the possession of his general Ptolemy, who soon proclaimed himself its king, Ptolemy I ‘the Saviour’ (Σωτήρ); it would be ruled by his Greek-speaking descendants for three centuries, until the last of them, Cleopatra VII, was defeated by the Roman strongman Octavian – ‘the emperor Augustus’ – in 31 BC. The Macedonian takeover of Egypt was accompanied by an influx of Greek colonists, who by and large preserved their language and cultural heritage. Typical Greek institutions like the gymnasium were implanted into Egypt, so as to promote the colonists’ Greekness and maintain a sense of distinction from their native Egyptian neighbours, 2 Enrico Emanuele Prodi こてんのちょうせん Papyrology who remained a large majority of the population. Literature in Greek – both the study of earlier writings and the composition of new ones – was an essential component in that sense of ethnic identity. Ptolemy I’s son, Ptolemy II (the males of the Ptolemaic dynasty had extremely unimaginative names), founded the Museum – Μουσεῖον, the Temple of the Muses – in the royal capital Alexandria, which included the celebrated Library. Attracting scholars and scientists from all over the Greek-speaking world, the Library of Alexandria became one of the foremost centres of learning in the ancient Mediterranean; it amassed a vast collection of Greek literature, and its members (some of whom were appointed tutors to the royal princes) worked tirelessly to write commentaries and histories and treatises in every branch of knowledge. The Library and its role as a cultural centre survived social and political turmoil, purges, fire damage during Julius Caesar’s invasion in 48 BC, and Octavian’s removal of some of its most precious treasures to Rome after the conquest; its importance only dwindled in the following centuries. The Latin language never gained a strong foothold in Egypt; under Roman rule, the Greek part of the population went on speaking Greek (just as the Egyptian part went on speaking Egyptian), and Greek remained the main language of the administration until the Arab conquest in AD 639–641. So the realm of Greek papyri is not limited to the books with which this chapter started. Some nine in ten surviving papyri, in fact, are what we call ‘documentary’ – as opposed to ‘literary’ – papyri. These pertain to all aspects of the life of individuals and of the community: government documents like tax records, census records, birth and death certificates, court proceedings; private documents like contracts, wills, accounts, receipts; communications at every level, from letters exchanged between private citizens to complaints sent to government officials to orders imparted by the monarch or the Roman governor; amulets, curses, posters, musical scores, school exercises… The earliest known Greek papyrus from Egypt is a sign with an order from one of Alexander’s generals (‘From Peukestas: No trespassing. This is a priest’s house’: SB XIV 11942) (fig. 1); another has been thought to have a subscription in Cleopatra’s own hand (P.Berol. 25239). But although political and military bigwigs crop up sometimes, most of the record revolves around relatively ordinary folk. It gives us a glimpse of the lives and dealings of those often overlooked by supercilious historians: women, slaves, members of the working classes. We have letters exchanged between children and their parents, between soldiers and their beloveds back home far away, between wealthy landowners and their various underlings. It is likewise thanks to documentary papyri that we have a better sense of the administration and economy of Egypt than of probably any other Hellenistic kingdom or Roman province, greatly expanding upon what we learn from historiographical and legal sources transmitted across the Middle Ages. Sometimes a sizeable group of papyri concerns a single individual, family, office, or estate, allowing us to examine its functioning in great detail. The largest and best known of these ‘archives’ is that of Zenon, overseer of an estate owned by a high official of Ptolemy II in the town of Philadelphia: about 3,000 papyri spanning the various phases of Zenon’s career from 261 to 229 BC and incorporating several smaller archives, now scattered amog different collections. The meticulous archaeological excavation in Karanis uncovered a small, intact archive from the early second century AD still hidden under the wooden threshold of ‘House 5026’ (fig. 2). The site of Oxyrhynchus (more on which anon) preserved a large archive belonging to the family conventionally known as the Apions, covering almost two centuries from the mid-fifth to the early seventh century AD. One house in the village of Aphrodito has yielded the archive of a man of letters, the lawyer Dioskoros: the material, amounting to some 350 papyri in Greek and in Coptic, includes legal documents from across Dioskoros’ career in the 3 Enrico Emanuele Prodi こてんのちょうせん Papyrology second half of the sixth century AD, several books he owned (one of which is the famous codex of the comedies of Menander now in the Cairo), and many of his own poetic compositions, making him the oldest known poet whose autographs survive. The literary equivalent of a documentary archive is, presumably, a library. There are a few examples from Egypt: that of Dioskoros of Aphrodito just mentioned; the cache of thirteen codices in Coptic from the third and fourth century AD found near Nag Hammadi and contaning Gnostic texts (including the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas), perhaps discarded after the definitive orthodox condemnation of Gnosticism; a few examples from Oxyrhynchus that we shall return to; others, too. Yet the most famous library to have survived from Classical antiquity is well away from Egypt. Herculaneum, a wealthy town on the northern shore of the Bay of Naples in southern Italy, was annihilated by the pyroclastic flow from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Memory of the event was preserved by historiographical sources and by the eyewitness testimony of Pliny the Younger, who related it in two letters to Tacitus (Letters 65 and 66). The remains of the town remained forgotten, buried under 20 metres of volcanic rock, until rumours began to spread in the early eighteenth century that locals digging a well had been finding statues deep underground. More sustained explorations started, then the King of Naples took an interest in the excavations. In 1750 one of the underground tunnels dug by his engineers struck the remains of a villa just outside the town, which yielded one of the richest and most exquisite collections of bronze sculptures to have survived in situ from antiquity. Yet the villa is not known today as Villa of the Statues, but as Villa of the Papyri. The reason is the massive library of carbonized papyrus rolls – about 1,800 pieces – that were found there. Unrolling a carbonized papyrus roll, it turns out, is a complicated business. Some of them were destroyed altogether in early attempts to prise apart the brittle layers of charred papyrus using chemicals or heat; others were damaged in the slow, laborious process of unrolling with the machine invented by Antonio Piaggio, with much material lost and a lessthan-perfect result; others still have been kept as they were, awaiting the day when researchers will be able to read them with non-invasive imaging techniques. Among those papyri that could be unrolled and read there are a few in Latin (the most extensive being a fragment of an epic on the battle of Actium, P.Herc. 817), but most of the library consisted of philosophical works in Greek. The probable owner of the villa, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus (consul in 58 BC), was the patron of the philosopher Philodemus, whose own writings constitute the bulk of the identified material and whose Epicurean doctrines (or Piso’s, which must have been very similar) shaped the entire collection. Modern scholars and laymen alike have professed disappointment with the relatively uninteresting contents of the library, but it has been invaluable to our knowledge of Greek philosophy in the centuries between Aristotle and Philodemus’ own time. The papyri are also of interest as physical texts. None of them has been shown to be in Philodemus’ own hand, but some are clearly his working copies; such is, for instance, the version of the so-called Index Academicorum preserved by P.Herc. 1021, where a draft text written in on the front of the roll is complemented by additions made subsequently on the back (the fair copy also survives, though only in a handful of fragments: P.Herc. 164). Only a part of the villa has been excavated, and scholars still debate whether the Latin part of Piso’s library – only the merest fragments of which have been recovered, yet it must have existed – was brought to safety before the eruption struck or is still hidden away in the unexcavated areas, underneath the modern city of Ercolano. The Herculaneum papyri were found in situ, since the pyroclastic flow from the volcano froze the entire city exactly as it was on the day of the eruption. Given the rudimentary 4 Enrico Emanuele Prodi こてんのちょうせん Papyrology excavation techniques of the mid-1700s, we do not know where each papyrus was found, but we do have an accurate map of the excavated sections of the Villa, and we know which areas papyri were found in. Excavations guided by scientific archaeological principles in the twentieth century have replicated that model and much improved it. The American excavation conducted at Karanis between 1924 and 1935 is held out as an outstanding early example: the team mapped the entire ruins and documented the position of each find, papyrological and not, within each house and room, providing the scholarly community with invaluable information on the papyri – documentary and literary alike – and their readers. In earlier days of papyrological acquisitions, papyri were often found in tombs, having been buried together with their owners. Beside several examples in Egypt (which pick up an extremely ancient Egyptian practice), the two oldest known Greek papyri come from burials: both found in Greece, one in Derveni near Thessaloniki (fourth century BC), one in the ‘Poet’s Tomb’ in Daphni on the outskirts of Athens (fifth century BC). In each of these cases, the papyrus was deliberately deposited as grave goods. Another way in which papyri have been recovered from graves is as part of funerary decorations. During the Ptolemaic period, mummy masks and similar items were often made with papyrus turned into a sort of papier mâché, then covered with plaster and painted – what papyrologists call cartonnage. Many Greek papyri have been recovered by dismantling cartonnage; one important recent example is the long papyrus roll with the epigrams of Posidippus (P.Mil.Vogl. VIII 309). The practice of extracting papyrus from cartonnage, however, is problematic, because it entails the destruction of another cultural artefact which has a history and a cultural value of its own. The day may not be far away when scholars can read papyri that are still embedded in cartonnage; similar research is ongoing on reading still-unrolled Herculaneum papyri without tampering with the fragile carbonised scrolls. Imaging research is the exciting new frontier of papyrology, bringing together papyrologists and scientists so as to use powerful technologies to scrutinise the past while preserving its material heritage. At least one more find context needs to be mentioned, perhaps an unlikely one: rubbish dumps. Unwanted things would be thrown out of the city in the ancient equivalent of landfill sites, which took the shape of large heaps of waste on the edge of the desert. As the city’s population dwindled, the desert slowly took over, covering those heaps of rubbish with sand, drying them out, and turning them into a characteristic ridge of hills, kimân in Egyptian Arabic. Unwanted papyri went the way of all other unwanted stuff, and the desert climate is ideal for the survival of papyrus, which rots with moisture but is much tougher than paper under dry conditions. So it was that, many centuries later, large quantities of discarded papyrus were found in these kimân. For an irony of fate we owe papyri not only to those who copied them or went to great length to preserve them, but also to those who threw them away under these uniquely favourable conditions. This kind of find-spot is particularly associated with the site of Oxyrhynchus, today called Behnesa. Once the second-largest city in Egypt after Alexandria, after antiquity it shrunk into a hamlet – the perfect conditions for the desert to take over the outskirts of the city and preserve more papyrus than in any other single site of Greco-Roman Egypt. Enter two Classics undergraduates at The Queen’s College, Oxford: Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt. After taking their degrees, they went to Egypt with a scholarship from the University to excavate papyri. After a largely unsuccessful first season in Karanis and Bacchias, they shifted their attention to Oxyrhynchus in the winter of 1896/7. They first excavated the cemeteries, hoping to find papyri deposited as grave goods, as elsewhere, which also proved fruitless; so they turned their attention to one of the kimân. The next day they made one of their most sensational discoveries: the ‘Sayings of Jesus’, a single page 5 Enrico Emanuele Prodi こてんのちょうせん Papyrology of a papyrus codex from the early third century AD which we now know to be part of the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. It was published as a pamphlet within a few months, in 1897, to enormous interest among the British public. Sponsored by the Egypt Exploration Fund (now Egypt Exploration Society), Grenfell and Hunt dug in Oxyrhynchus for six seasons, amassing what is sometimes said to be the largest papyrus collection in the world. Since volume I of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri appeared in 1898 – with the Λόγια Ἰησοῦ having pride of place as P.Oxy. 1 – 85 volumes have been published, comprising a total of 5,519 items: a rhythm of about a papyrus a week, if we allow for a few holidays and two world wars. Several thousands more fragments are still being edited, housed in the Papyrology Room of Oxford’s Sackler Library. Due to my research expertise and my sentimental attachment to the Oxyrhynchus collection, the end of this short survey will be dedicated to some Oxyrhynchite material. But before concluding in that way, we should take a step back and take a look at papyrology as a discipline and its history, which cannot be separated from our work on the texts. Conventionally, the beginnings of papyrology are dated to 1788, when the first Greek papyrus from Egypt – known as the Charta Borgiana after its owner, cardinal Stefano Borgia – was published in print. The publication of the Herculaneum papyri started soon afterward, but what set the study of papyri towards becoming an academic discipline in its own right was the massive European interest in Egypt following Napoleon’s invasion of the country in 1798–1801. Excavations intensified during the nineteenth century, as did purchases of papyri on the antiquarian market. Such excavations often happened with little or no attention to context or documentation; many papyri that were acquired on the antiquarian market have no known findspot, or they were given one that is vague or outright invented. Egypt was occupied by Great Britain, under various guises, from 1882 until after the coup that toppled the Egyptian monarchy in 1952; papyrological excavations were thus deeply enmeshed with colonial attitudes and practices. When we say that ‘Grenfell and Hunt excavated in Oxyrhynchus’, what we mean is that a large troop of local workmen – including a great many children – did the digging under Grenfell and Hunt’s supervision, extracting the papyri during the day for them to sort and file during the night, until at the end of each season they were shipped to Oxford for study and publication. Whether by excavation or by purchase, this is the story of most papyrological collections outside Naples and the Middle East. The overarching administration of Egypt’s cultural heritage was not in British hands, but French, from the foundation of the Antiquities Service in 1858 to the coup of 1952. Typically, foreign archaeological missions split their finds with the Egyptian government; more often than not, papyri were in the part that left the country. So there was a legal process for exports, yet ‘explorers’ were not always bothered by such niceties, even when on official mission: Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, long the British Museum’s representative across the Middle East, proudly narrates his stratagem to smuggle a papyrus of Bacchylides out of the country without Egyptian customs officials noticing (now British Library pap. 733). All export of papyri from Egypt is illegal now, but there is still a market for papyri that are said to have left the country before the conventional date of 1970 – sometimes with clear documentation of this fact, often not. Much as in the case of Iraq after the Second Gulf War, there is evidence that the revolution of 2011 was followed by an increase in illegal digs, whose outputs are then smuggled abroad and sold, sometimes over the internet. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European agendas coloured the papyrological phenomenon in other ways, too. One of the big drivers of papyrological excavations and purchases, for instance, was the quest for early New Testament manuscripts and other documents that could shed light on early Christianity. Several of the big private collections of 6 Enrico Emanuele Prodi こてんのちょうせん Papyrology papyri of the time (Alfred Chester Beatty, Martin Bodmer, Charles Lang Freer) had Biblical papyri as their centrepieces; it was such manuscripts in particular, even more than those of classical authors, that captivated the interest of contemporary newspapers and their readers – whence Grenfell and Hunt’s immediate drumming-up of previously unknown ‘Sayings of Jesus’. This interest is still alive and shaping public perceptions of the discipline: witness, on the one hand, the papyrological dealings of the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC, and on the other, the clamorous forgery known as the ‘Gospel of Jesus’ Wife’. Also telling are some longlived preferences of the papyrological world: that given to papyri over other archaeological items, as evidenced in the Oxyrhynchus excavations and even more by the practice of dismantling cartonnage in the quest for papyri; that given to literary over documentary papyri, a division of scholarly attention that does not correspond at all to their respective proportion in the record; that given to Greek over, for instance, Arabic papyri and, correspondingly, to the GraecoRoman rather than Islamic period. (Here, again, disciplinary boundaries are unhelpful.) Back to Oxyrhynchus for a coda on my personal obsession – libraries and old books. Grenfell and Hunt’s records are extremely patchy for modern standards, especially for papyri that were published before the 1970s, and the material was found in a non-place of sorts – a landfill – to begin with. Most of the time we do not know exactly when, and more to the point exactly where in the site, a given papyrus was found. This means that each papyrus is an isolated entity, whose connection with other papyri is only a matter for speculation. There are three big exceptions: three large finds of literary papyri made within a few days of each other in the sixth and final season, in January 1906. These were so remarkable that Grenfell and Hunt talk about them in their excavation reports and in the newspaper articles which publicised their discoveries. In each of these three cases, a large number of literary papyri were found in close proximity to each other, so each group had been probably thrown away in one go. This suggests that the three finds represent three libraries, each kept together for a significant amount of time before being disposed of in late antiquity. And what a library each of these was. The first find is remarkable for comprising several large and well-preserved rolls, which have been of the greatest importance for scholars of Greek literature and history: the so-called Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, a history of Greece in the fourth century BC whose author remains unknown (P.Oxy. 842); Euripides’ Hypsipyle, the best-preserved of fragmentary tragedies (P.Oxy. 853); Pindar’s Paeans (P.Oxy. 841); known texts, too, such as Plato’s Symposium and Isocrates’ Panegyricus (P.Oxy. 843, 844)… Twelve manuscripts in all, many of which are heavily annotated; indeed, P.Oxy. 841 was especially copied with a view to leaving space for annotations, with the verses of the texts spaced well apart and wide margins left blank above, below, and between the columns of writing. The third find is bigger, though the individual papyri are much less well preserved. Beside authors like Homer, Hesiod, Xenophon, and Demosthenes, it stands out for a ‘set’ of manuscripts of Aeschylus: at least ten rolls, perhaps many more – including many otherwise lost plays – all written by the same scribe in an identical format, and evidently meant as a single editorial project. Aeschylus was not a hugely popular author: this single find, on the most conservative estimate, accounts for more than a third of the Aeschylean material from Oxyrhynchus. But the most interesting of the three finds is arguably the second. These papyri lay above a layer of documents dated to the fourth and fifth century AD, so the collection was probably disposed of in the fifth century. (New layers of material are deposited on top of existing ones, so the respective position in the soil provides the relative dating of the layers: this is what archaeologists call ‘stratigraphy’.) Yet the papyri are much earlier: most of them date to the 7 Enrico Emanuele Prodi こてんのちょうせん Papyrology second or third century AD, and some are significantly earlier. Many are annotated, often by several hands. The contents are varied, but there is a great deal of poetry, including some decidedly niche authors and texts: beside Theocritus, Callimachus, and Sophocles (including lost dramas like the satyr play Ἰχνευταί, which inspired Tony Harrison’s play The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus) we have five rolls of Alcaeus, two of Sappho, at least six of Pindar (five of which constitute a ‘set’ like that of Aeschylus in the third find), two of Bacchylides, and one of a lessknown lyricist from the sixth century BC, Ibycus (fig. 3). This last papyrus (P.Oxy. 1790) is the earliest of the lot, and one of the earliest papyri from Oxyrhynchus altogether. It can be dated to the late second or early first century BC: it was five hundred years old, or slightly more, when it was sent to the kip together with the rest of the collection. (A collection of old books is not unique in antiquity: some books in the Villa of the Papyri were some three centuries old when Vesuvius struck.) The papyrus kept being used throughout that time: a marginal annotation can be dated to the first or second century AD. What is more, it was restored in antiquity: it was treated with cedar oil, for preservation and for aesthetic effect, after the annotation was written, and the upper and lower edges of the roll were strengthened with additional strips of papyrus. Intriguingly, these strips of papyrus were not entirely blank: multispectral imaging reveals that they had writing on the back, which can be transcribed (though, alas, not identified) and dated to the second century AD. This unidentified book must have been cut up and reused for scrap papyrus some time after it was produced – that is, about the same time as most of the books in the collection were being made, around the turn of the second/third century AD. We can thus imagine an owner simultaneously having new manuscripts copied for his collection (eleven of the rolls are by the hand of only four scribes, suggesting a targeted effort) and conserving the older ones, or indeed buying old books that needed repair. In this case as in many others, we have no evidence beside the papyri themselves. We do not know if these were public or private libraries; we don’t know who their owners were or what they did; we can only infer what they liked reading, and what they found interesting or challenging in the texts they read. We can speculate about the latter by looking at the annotations they left in the margins of the papyri; additionally, these annotations sometimes cite other works, allowing us to reconstruct the annotator’s further readings. When a papyrus is annotated by more than one hand, we can see it either changing hands or, more probably, being used by a circle of readers. One day, comparison of annotators’ handwriting across different papyri may help us trace an individual’s readings and their annotation practices; comparison with documents may even give some of them a name. But that is only a corner of the vast, open horizon of future papyrological research. Further reading The essential handbook on all aspects of papyrology is Bagnall (ed.) 2009. A more detailed treatment, with special regard to documentary papyri, is Montevecchi 1988 (in Italian); Pestman 1994 is a concise and hands-on treatment of documentary papyri in English. An introduction to literary papyri and their characteristics, with an invaluable set of plates and transcriptions, is Turner and Parsons 1987; Parsons 1982 outlines the contribution of papyri to the recovery of lost Classical literature. Another important introduction to papyrology is Turner 1968. For the particular study of the Herculaneum papyri see Capasso 1991 (in Italian). Parsons 2007 is a very entertaining book on Oxyrhynchus and its papyri written for a popular audience; a more 8 Enrico Emanuele Prodi こてんのちょうせん Papyrology scholarly treatment of the site, with documents from the excavations, is Bowman et al. (eds.) 2007. On the early history of papyrology in Egypt, with a particular focus on the quest for early Christian manuscripts, see Nongbri 2018. On ancient collections of books, including the evidence from Oxyrhynchus, see Houston 2014. Three online databases need mentioning: Trismegistos (https://www.trismegistos.org), which includes several sub-databases on various aspects of papyri and their contents; https://papyri.info, a massive repository of documentary papyri; and the Mertens-Pack database hosted by the Centre de Documentation de Papyrologie Littéraire (https://web.philo.ulg.ac.be/cedopal/database-mp3/), which collects data and a bibliography for every known Greek and Latin literary papyrus. I also mention three blogs on papyrological topics: Jennifer Cromwell’s Papyrus Stories (https://papyrus-stories.com), Roberta Mazza’s Faces & Voices (https://facesandvoices.wordpress.com), and Brent Nongbri’s Variant Readings (https://brentnongbri.com). Bibliography Bagnall, R. (ed.) 2009. The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology. Oxford. Bowman, A. K. et al. (eds.) 2007. Oxyrhynchus: A City and its Texts. London. Capasso, M. 1991. Manuale di papirologia ercolanese. Galatina. Houston, G. W. 2014. Inside Roman Libraries: Book Collections and their Management in Antiquity. Chapel Hill. Montevecchi, O. 1988. La papirologia. 2nd ed. Milan. Nongbri, B. 2018. God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts. New Haven. Parsons, P. J. 1982. ‘Facts from fragments’, Greece & Rome 29/2, 184-195. Parsons, P. J. 2007. The City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Lives in Roman Egypt. London. Pestman, P. 1994. The New Papyrological Primer. Leiden. Turner, E. G. 1968. Greek Papyri: An Introduction. Oxford. Turner, E. G. and Parsons, P. J. 1987. Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World. 2nd ed. London. 9