Oxyrhynchus Papyri

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In the next phase of our project we aim to exploit unpublished papyri for their unique contribution to the cultural and political history of the Roman and early Byzantine world.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.

Academic and public knowledge of the Graeco-Roman world, the common heritage of Europe and far beyond, is increased by three main sources of new information: archaeological finds, new inscriptions and new texts on papyrus. Publishing new papyrus texts is the primary purpose of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri project. The first beneficiaries of this research project are specialists in the ancient world, but it also informs and stimulates interest among the general public. The success of the recent book of Peter Parsons on Oxyrhynchus, _City of the Sharp-nosed Fish_, is testimony to this large audience eager to learn about 'Greek Lives in Roman Egypt' and beyond.

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project and papyrology in Britain have become virtually synonymous, but the practitioners come from a plurality of nations: the project brings together researchers and students from several dozen countries in four different continents. Thus it offers a platform for inter-cultural communication, which goes beyond academic collaboration. In addition, through research on the Oxyrhynchus papyri, Britain leads the way in the understanding of the best-documented part of the ancient world, and our publications are the central point of reference.

The Oxyrhynchus papyri provide the backbone for the training of students in papyrology. The study of papyri offers a unique opportunity to anyone involved to embrace the entirety of Greek and Roman culture in its Mediterranean setting and thus does not reside exclusively in the home of tertiary education. There is keen interest in the papyri from continuing education programmes and secondary schools, and we are doing our best to respond to it by giving talks, often illustrated by original papyri, and hosting visits to the collection. The project will continue its record of hosting and directing two sixth-formers per year at the request of their schools, thus involving students learning Latin and Greek at the secondary level in the ongoing hands-on cataloguing and processing of ancient documents written in those languages.

We plan a series of public events to accompany and promote research and to disseminate its results. We hope to organize one or more workshops at the British Academy, following on the successful 'Oxyrhynchus Day', held at the Academy in June 2009, which will showcase some of our work in progress: important texts will be discussed by invited specialists, with the results to be announced in a concluding public presentation. We will include a number of texts concerning sport and spectacles in a volume to appear in 2012, the year of the London Olympic games, and will promote this publication, among non-specialists, thus increasing awareness of the ancient background to the Olympic tradition. We will continue to contribute to the outreach activities of the Egypt Exploration Society (a registered charity).

A substantial web presence for the project is sustained through collaboration with the Imaging Papyri Project, which will continue to make the collection visible and all the items of each volume of papyri as it is published publicly available at http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/POxy.

The papyri enjoy an increasing interest in the media, and have been the subject of several newspaper articles and radio and television documentaries. We expect the media interest to continue (two BBC productions involving members of the project team are being planned). We also aim to publish a number of articles about the latest published texts of particular general interest in journals and magazines for wider audiences at home and abroad.

The stories from Oxyrhynchus and its papyri feed the imagination, and have eveninspired creative writing: from Edwardian novels to Tony Harrison's _The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus_ and to a cameo appearance in Tom Stoppard's _Rock and Roll_. There is no end to the supply of such sto