Volume 15, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Greek Literary Papyri in Context Issue Editors: Francesca Maltomini/Serena Perrone

Literary papyri are not just bearers of the texts they preserve, but also material witnesses to the circulation and readership of literature in Graeco-Roman Egypt. As such, they may shed some light on the production practices and functions of these copies: on their scribes, their readers, their uses and reuses in different contexts. Only recently has a full awareness of the importance of these aspects been achieved and, even though attempts at contextualising literary fragments often prove problematic in many ways, the potential rewards of a holistic approach to literary papyri can still be analysed and exploited.

The article focuses on a group of five literary papyri dated to the second half of the second century BC that have been scattered among three different collections (Berlin, Manchester and Paris). Based on a thorough analysis of their material aspects, I attempt to define the context and purpose of their production.

The chapter discusses the cases of opisthographic papyri dealing with a medical content. According to Manfredo Manfredi’s definition of opisthograph as a papyrus roll reused to transcribe an extensive text, the focus will be on scrolls repurposed on their back side to copy Greek medical treatises, handbooks or receptaria. The analysis will consider the material features of such copies – the nature and quality of the original text, the medical genre, palaeography – in order to draw some preliminary conclusions about the relationship between reuse and genre in a highly specialized technical category of papyrus texts.

Of the 66 papyri that certainly preserve sections of Menander’s comedies, 40 are fragments of bookrolls. Given the significant number of these items, an analysis of their bibliological aspects yields interesting data on the material characteristics of the author’s transmission. The present paper will analyse the use of recto and verso in the surviving Menandrian papyri, with particular regard to the copies written on the back of documents.

During his excavations in the Fayum, between 1900 and 1902, Pierre Jouguet was able to find a large number of mummy cartonnages, which along with documents of various sorts yielded some surprising, previously lost literary texts, such as Menander’s Sicyonians , Euripides’ Erechtheus , and Stesichorus’ Thebaid . The exact find-spot of the papyri is unclear: we know that the mummies were found in different necropoleis between Medinet Ghoran and Medinet en Nahas (ancient Magdola), but clear topographic information is largely missing: after reaching France, the cartonnages were dismantled in different steps over a span of several decades, so their ‘archival’ history is often difficult to trace. Nonetheless, even if their archaeological context is lost, the texts seem to point to common cultural contexts, as suggested by a comparison of their philological, palaeographic and ‘bibliological’ features. This article will survey such characteristics, in order to reflect on the readership and circulation of Greek literary texts in Ptolemaic Egypt.

Within the framework of the preparation of the first edition of P.Fouad inv. 220 (unknown provenance, 3rd c. AD), an anonymous Greek hexametric poetry fragment accompanied by a critical siglum, and following my previous work on scribal practices in Greek literary papyri, especially on the graphic signs that accompany these texts, this paper lists all the critical and utilitarian signs attested in the 247 Greek surviving hexametric papyri of the Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine periods. These sigla are either directly associated with editorial work or were added by the scribe or corrector to provide the reader with practical information about the text. In doing so, the paper aims to better understand how the ancients conceived the writing of poetic works, and how they read, cited, and used them.

This article analyzes a group of Byzantine papyri originating from the Oxyrhynchite and containing scribal exercises, which are connected to the famous domus gloriosa of the Apiones. Most of them are written on reused documents belonging to the Apionic dossier, and consist of documentary formulas or short passages copied out of other texts related to the management of the oikos . In a few cases, exercises seem to consist of copies of whole texts such as lists or accounts, so that they can be easily mistaken for real documents. Based on all these texts and on other papyrological evidence related to this issue, it is possible to argue that the oikos of the Apiones was involved in the management of a professional school located in the city of Oxyrhynchus and aiming at the education of future clerks.

The common association between the teaching of numbers and basic arithmetical operations, on the one hand, and the earliest levels of linguistic-literary education, on the other, is a datum on which interpreters of Greek papyrological sources are now essentially agreed. A more controversial and less often considered question is whether, in these same ‘scholastic courses’, this basic knowledge also encompassed geometrical and metrological calculations in the form of ‘problems’ (which are typical of the papyrological mathematical tradition). Only a few witnesses to the latter type of texts in Greek have characteristics that would most likely associate them with instructional contexts. The four oldest of these date between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD and are of proven or hypothetical Fayumic provenance. Although they are few in number, these witnesses attest to certain practices in the teaching of mathematics, at least in this historical-geographical context, which are worthy of note.

The paper offers an analysis of the possible clues for contextualising papyrus commentaries (hypomnemata), with particular reference to fragments from Roman-era Oxyrhynchus (1st–3rd c. AD). Examples of such clues are presented, including instances of reuse, identified scribe, the presence of secondary interventions, preserved colophon or other indications of authoriality, and documented archaeological findspot.

An analysis of the early history of digging at Kom Aushim and the Museum archaeology of Karanis papyri purchased on the Egyptian antiquities market is combined with archaeological data from the University of Michigan’s excavations to locate purchased papyri in the archaeological record.

The literary papyri found by Otto Rubensohn on January 25 and 27, 1905, were unearthed together with the archive of the Taurinus family (5th–6th c.) in a dump at Hermopolis. Herwig Maehler proposed that, due to the circumstances of their discovery, these books may have belonged to one of the family members. This hypothesis, if correct, is all the more interesting since it makes these papyri one of the few papyrological libraries with a precise historical context. In this paper, I attempt to make an overall assessment of this library, which has never been inventoried, and discuss its possible relationship with the documentary archive of the Taurini.