The Oxyrhynchus Papyri
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: Classics Faculty
Abstract
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.
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.
Planned Impact
Greece and Rome are not dead: new information accrues all the time (excavations, inscriptions, papyri). Our Project will diffuse virgin material, a chosen group of new papyri. The first beneficiaries will be specialists, but we seek also to spread our enthusiasm to a more general constituency. The success of Peter Parsons' book on Oxyrhynchus, 'City of the Sharp-nosed Fish' (now translated into six European languages), suggests a wide audience in waiting.
The Oxyrhynchus project has always been a British enterprise, but it recruits expert contributors Europewide and beyond, offering a platform for inter-cultural communication that goes beyond academic collaboration. Its publications impact on a whole range of Mediterranean studies.
The papyri will be published in five annual volumes: at each stage we shall enter the basic texts and translations into the Duke DataBank of Documentary Papyri and the nascent Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri (Heidelberg/New York), which ensure immediate electronic circulation. The Project's substantial web-presence will be maintained also through collaboration with the Imaging Papyri Project, which will host digital images of the papyri as they reach publication (http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/POxy).
Our papyri provide the backbone for the training of students in papyrology, but their appeal extends beyond tertiary education: they offer a unique worm's-eye view of Greco-Roman culture in its local setting. Schools and Continuing Education programmes engage with the material: we shall continue to respond by giving talks (with original papyri) and hosting visits to the collection. Thus pupils studying Classical Civilisation will encounter at first hand documents written in the ancient languages, which may encourage them to learn the languages themselves.
We shall continue to make available material for the citizen science enterprise 'Ancient Lives'. This puts images online and encourages anyone interested to try their hand at decipherment and to submit the results electronically to the organisers. The site claims more than 925, 000 users, and some results (checked and written up by professionals) will fuel our publications.
We shall reach a wider public by promoting events and exhibitions that highlight the new material included in this application. We plan lectures and panels for a general audience, on the lines of 'Pulp Fiction' (British Academy, Feb. 2015). The exhibition 'One God' (British Museum, Nov. 2015) will showcase one of our new drawings, as well as six published items; we are negotiating to lend further unpublished drawings to an exhibition at the Uffizi Gallery (in planning); we shall ourselves mount an exhibition of biblical and patristic texts for the Patristic Congress of 2017 (Oxford).
Individual papyri often allow appealing glimpses of real life: thus P.Oxy. 5209, in which a boy wrestler contracts to throw his match for a fee, made headlines on the BBC World Service and as far away as Der Spiegel and Fox News. We include in this application a selection of comparable papyri, each of which forms the centrepiece of a wider story about ancient society: Christian origins, women's life and literacy, magic and anxiety, Egypt and its arts. In tandem with research and publication we shall systematically promote public interest in these finds through press releases via the press offices of our Universities and of the Egypt Exploration Society and the British Academy, and in regular briefings for the AHRC's own website and channel.
The rubbish of Oxyrhynchus has its own strange glamour, still felt when a public event (actors and papyrologists) celebrated the 25th anniversary of Tony Harrison's Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (Nov. 2013). Most recently, Jenny Saville's exhibition 'Oxyrhynchus' (2014) shows artwork inspired by the vision of piled up paper. We shall seize any chance to build on this appeal.
The Oxyrhynchus project has always been a British enterprise, but it recruits expert contributors Europewide and beyond, offering a platform for inter-cultural communication that goes beyond academic collaboration. Its publications impact on a whole range of Mediterranean studies.
The papyri will be published in five annual volumes: at each stage we shall enter the basic texts and translations into the Duke DataBank of Documentary Papyri and the nascent Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri (Heidelberg/New York), which ensure immediate electronic circulation. The Project's substantial web-presence will be maintained also through collaboration with the Imaging Papyri Project, which will host digital images of the papyri as they reach publication (http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/POxy).
Our papyri provide the backbone for the training of students in papyrology, but their appeal extends beyond tertiary education: they offer a unique worm's-eye view of Greco-Roman culture in its local setting. Schools and Continuing Education programmes engage with the material: we shall continue to respond by giving talks (with original papyri) and hosting visits to the collection. Thus pupils studying Classical Civilisation will encounter at first hand documents written in the ancient languages, which may encourage them to learn the languages themselves.
We shall continue to make available material for the citizen science enterprise 'Ancient Lives'. This puts images online and encourages anyone interested to try their hand at decipherment and to submit the results electronically to the organisers. The site claims more than 925, 000 users, and some results (checked and written up by professionals) will fuel our publications.
We shall reach a wider public by promoting events and exhibitions that highlight the new material included in this application. We plan lectures and panels for a general audience, on the lines of 'Pulp Fiction' (British Academy, Feb. 2015). The exhibition 'One God' (British Museum, Nov. 2015) will showcase one of our new drawings, as well as six published items; we are negotiating to lend further unpublished drawings to an exhibition at the Uffizi Gallery (in planning); we shall ourselves mount an exhibition of biblical and patristic texts for the Patristic Congress of 2017 (Oxford).
Individual papyri often allow appealing glimpses of real life: thus P.Oxy. 5209, in which a boy wrestler contracts to throw his match for a fee, made headlines on the BBC World Service and as far away as Der Spiegel and Fox News. We include in this application a selection of comparable papyri, each of which forms the centrepiece of a wider story about ancient society: Christian origins, women's life and literacy, magic and anxiety, Egypt and its arts. In tandem with research and publication we shall systematically promote public interest in these finds through press releases via the press offices of our Universities and of the Egypt Exploration Society and the British Academy, and in regular briefings for the AHRC's own website and channel.
The rubbish of Oxyrhynchus has its own strange glamour, still felt when a public event (actors and papyrologists) celebrated the 25th anniversary of Tony Harrison's Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (Nov. 2013). Most recently, Jenny Saville's exhibition 'Oxyrhynchus' (2014) shows artwork inspired by the vision of piled up paper. We shall seize any chance to build on this appeal.
Organisations
Publications
Benaissa A.
(2019)
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri volume 84
Brusuelas J
(2017)
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri vol. 81
Gonis N
(2016)
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri vol. 82
Gonis N.
(2018)
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri vol. 83
Gonis N.
(2020)
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri volume 85
| Description | The two volumes published in this period (papyri nos. 5258-5343) contribute important data in three central areas of the Project's research. 1. Religious texts: early Christianity. Papyri datable to the third and fourth centuries AD attest what early Christians were reading before the New Testament canon solidified. Ephesians (5258) is not surprising, but I Timothy (5259) is a rarity, and 5290 offers the Book of Jannes and Jambres (two magicians who opposed Moses, II Timothy 3.8), an apocryphal work known only from fragments but widely enough read to be translated into Ethiopic. Magic remained important, transcending the boundary between pagan and Christian, and this is illustrated in a dozen new texts. The most basic resource was the amulet. Three written by the same magician offer Christian protection against seven types of fever (5306-7); another catalogues the angels and their spheres of interest, who are to favour Johannes the wearer of the amulet (5312); a hymn in praise of the Cross (5260) may serve a similar purpose. The magician, whether professional or amateur, needed handbooks of spells, and we have fragments of these in 5303-5, which include spells to subdue the heart of a woman and to silence your opponent in a lawcourt. This is the syncretistic world of Late Antiquity, in concrete detail: note 5309, an amulet for a Christian with the pagan name of Apis which offers protection 'now now quickly quickly' - the typical formula of pagan erotic charms. Christian imagery appears in 5343, a sketch in black and red ink of Daniel with two fawning lions. 2. Ancient Greek Literature. The Egyptian Greeks read classical texts which then disappeared in the Middle Ages. 5261, from the lost poet Simonides, corrects a passage which survives otherwise only in quotation. 5292 offers a fragment from the lost Tereus of Sophocles, ending the rueful reflections of the heroine and leading into a messenger speech by a shepherd; 5283-5 preserve prose summaries of the plays of Euripides, with substantial new information about the lost tragedies Danae and Dictys. A later genre, the novel, benefits from 5262-3: the lost Romance of Sesonchosis King of Egypt was one of those 'historical' novels in which the Greeks of the diaspora could enjoy the reflected glory of the ancient conquerors who had ruled their new homeland. 5263, perhaps a summary rather than the novel itself, shows for the first time the full ambition of this saga: Sesonchosis moves northwards from Egypt through Italy and Germany to Britain, then to Thule and the ice, then back and westwards to the place where the sun sets, where he meets the phoenix. Alongside these we have early witnesses to known texts. The papyri often show the textual tradition at a stage earlier than the medieval manuscripts: so 5266 may correct a reading in Sophocles Philoctetes, 5296 contributes five new readings, one at least very plausible, in Theocritus Idyll 22. At the same time they show what texts were being read at Oxyrhynchus in which centuries. Polybius the historian is a rarity (5267, 5300), even rarer an Euclid with diagrams (5299); really notable a fresh crop of identifications (some made through the crowd-sourcing site 'Ancient Lives') that represent 'contemporary' authors being read in their own generation or the next - Plutarch, Epictetus, Lucian, Oppian (5270-78, 5301). Thus modern best-sellers, as well as ancient classics, made their way to a market town in Egypt: a solid reminder of the global range and force of Hellenic culture in the Roman Empire. 3. Roman and Byzantine Egypt: economy and society. Individual documents reinforce the texture of life in a highly bureaucratic system. Economic management depends partly on a census every fourteen years (5318), and legal challenges go up the hierarchy from strategos to epistrategos to the Prefect himself (5316, 5319); on the ground everything depends on the harvest, and therefore on a fully engineered and maintained irrigation system (5320). In the fifth and sixth centuries the economic base remains the same, societal forms change (3522-42): these documents, which include some from the huge family archive of the patrician Apiones, illustrate the enterprises of large landowners and the administration of great ('feudal') estates. The government continues to tax: so in 5339-41 individuals who have disposed of property take care to report the fact to the tax-inspectors, with a request to remove their liability from the records. But the estate is a world in itself. 5289, a petition of the seventh century, may serve as a snapshot of the early medieval scene. Marous, who claims to have been beaten up by another woman, appeals not to a public official but to her estate manager, describing herself as 'your slave' and begging him to protect her rights, since the accused is 'giving presents to the authorities and spreading rumours' about her. KEY FINDINGS March 2018 The findings in our latest volume (2018) continue to contribute new information and new questions under the established headings: 1. Religious texts. (a) Scholars of the New Testament will note 5347, a text of the Epistle to Philemon dating from the fourth century - one of only two early copies of this minor Epistle, which it is interesting to find circulating so early in an Egyptian market town. In addition, fragments of the Gospels of Mark (second/third century) and Luke (third century), which have already been much discussed on line (sites like 'Evangelical Textual Criticism'), on the assumption that the Mark dates from the first century, which would show the Gospel circulating soon after its composition. We regard this dating as most unlikely, but no doubt the controversy will continue. (b) 5348 contains two excerpts from a Greek tragedy on a Jewish theme, the 'Exodus' of Ezekiel. This tragedy belonged to the flowering of Greek-Hebrew culture in the Hellenistic period, represented by the translation of the Hebrew bible (the Septuagint) and the conflict between assimilation and exceptionalism in Israel, as the Books of Maccabees relate it. Some Jewish authors assimilated to the ruling culture by writing Greek in classical Greek genres: such was the Philo who wrote an epic poem on Jewish history from Abraham onwards. Ezekiel followed the same pattern. His tragedy survived only in quotations in later Christian authors; and in fact 5348 copies exactly the two extracts to be found in Clement of Alexandria. It is remarkable to see Clement's work available at Oxyrhynchus in the fourth century AD. Still more remarkable is the format of the new papyrus: a business letter was turned over, and the back used to copy the verses of Ezekiel (smaller at the end, to squeeze it all onto one sheet) - an amateur copy, that is, which raises social questions. Was the copyist a Jew or a Christian? and what was the copy for - piety, simple interest, or for recitation (the text is Moses' own account of his birth and career)? 2. Ancient Greek Literature. 5354-6 present new fragments of the Greek Novel. Five such novels survive complete, but papyri have shown how many more circulated in antiquity and how much more varied the genre was. 5354 contains an episode from Antonius Diogenes' 'The Incredible Things beyond Thule', which illustrates the level of detailed intrigue that maintained the reader's interest throughout this enormous narrative (originally in twenty four books): our heroes advance, with daggers concealed, to meet a mysterious old woman at a deserted house. 5355 comes from 'Kalligone': our heroine (whose name means 'born beautiful') is shipwrecked among the Amazons, who here live close to the Sea of Azov: it seems that she trains their army to fight the tribes that have captured her native city of Olbia. Many novels took their Greek characters adventuring in Egypt or the Near East; readers of the Roman period, many of whom formed a new ruling class in just those regions, could empathise with such adventures just as they themselves felt surrouned by the native inhabitants. Kalligone has exceptional historical resonance, since in actual fact Olbia had been sacked by the Thracians about 50BC. 5356 adds a new unknown: Eusyene (a unique name) stands contemplating a flowing spring, when twenty marauders seize her, throw her on a horse, and carry her off 3. Roman and Byzantine Egypt. (a) 5351-3 offer texts, half literary and half historical, from the genre of Acta Alexandrinorum. This genre, known only from papyri, reflects the relations between the great metropolis of Alexandria and the Roman government, in part through accounts, in documentary or pseudo-documentary form, of trials, in which former Roman governors of Egypt are prosecuted for their misdeeds. The trial of Maximus is already known, and 5351 adds another piece. The trial of Titianus (5352-3) is new, and of exceptional interest. He had been a friend of the Emperor Hadrian, who appointed him. Now he is accused not just of misgovernment, but apparently of embezzlement and treason; his advocates (three very distinguished senators) refuse to defend him, and the Emperor, presiding, does not save him. We know from other sources that he was condemned, and suffered damnatio memoriae - his name erased from his Egyptian inscriptions. This has the air of a show trial; and it is easy to imagine that at the end of Hadrian's reign, with the emperor sick and the nomination of a successor hotly disputed, the ruling elite split and those on the wrong side, like Titianus, had to be purged under a cover of legality. (b) Imperial authority depended partly on propaganda, which involved the public celebrating a successful reign. 5401, a unique survival, comes from a ceremonial shield, skin on a wooden frame, originally round or oval. The fragment preserves part of a painted laurel-wreath embellished with painted jewels, which encloses a Latin text in large capitals. The inscription commemorates the twentieth (probably) anniversary of an emperor's accession, and from the script an emperor of the fourth century: no doubt the shield, with its laurels of victory, was displayed or carried in procession during a patriotic celebration of the occasion. (c) Egypt was of prime importance to the Empire, above all economically: Egyptian grain helped to feed Rome and Constantinople. Grain from the threshing floor could be contaminated with earth, by accident - or by deliberate fraud, to bulk it out. 5362 contains an order (to be displayed in all towns and villages) that this grain should be sieved, and stored under guard, and transported with a military escort to prevent theft. Agricultural production depended on water: except during the Nile flood, this had to be raised from the river by shadouf or more efficiently by a water wheel. 5365-5400 come from the archive of the 'glorious house of the Apions', a great estate (it might be called feudal) in Egypt of the fifth and sixth centuries (5372, of Sept. 7, 551, is now the earliest item). The estate had police powers, and many of the new documents show named individuals guaranteeing under penalty to produce defaulters when called for: in the most interesting (5395) a junior civil servant, who is careful to secure his position by citing recent legislation, guarantees that he will keep Abraham in his village, or himself pay a very substantial fine (three pounds of gold). The villager's lot is to farm, and farm-land needed water-wheels. Some of our new evidence shows how many water-wheels the estate comprised, and how vulnerable they were to wear and tear. Supervisor after supervisor applies to the Master, through a subordinate, for replacement parts, most often the main axle. An axle could last no more than five to seven years: that is a central fact about ancient agriculture, and especially in Egypt, where wood was always in short supply. 4. Drawings. These represent a special category for this quinquennium, as a contribution to the general question of drawing in antiquity. Normally of course drawings from Greece or Italy do not survive, and scholars can only conjecture about drawing as an art and drawings as preliminaries or patterns for painting, sculpture and mosaics. The publication of the 'Artemidorus papyrus' has renewed the discussion. Its repertory of sketched heads and limbs, animals and fantastic beasts, is unique: so unique that some scholars have thought the whole thing a forgery. Thus the drawings from Oxyrhynchus are important not only in themselves, but also as a demonstration of comparable technique and subject in papyri of undoubted authenticity. The two items in this volume offer direct parallels: 5402, a fine pen and ink drawing of a rampant goat, and 5403, seven sketches on both sides of a single sheet, including a cockerel and a peacock, a wild boar, and a unicorn. Research for 2018 has focused on producing The Oxyrhynchus Papyri vol. 84 (scheduled for publication in March 2019). The varied content supplies brand new data to different areas of Classical and Byzantine studies: (1) The early Christian Church. We publish a group of 10 leaves from multiple codices (volumes) of the Greek Old Testament, a scatter covering books from Numbers to Jeremiah. The same hand copied all the leaves: we have therefore to visualise an extensive set of volumes covering the whole Old Testament, copied probably in the sixth century AD. The format has special interest. Each page is tall and narrow, on a ratio of 2:1, and contains a single column of text written out in a large formal script, letters c. 0.7 cm. tall and about 15 letters per line. As a working hypothesis, we suggest that these were 'lectern bibles', as opposed to grand reference bibles like the Codex Sinaiticus, which crams the text into large square pages with four column to each. The early church appointed 'readers', who probably read out the scripture to a (largely illiterate?) audience. The short lines and large letters of this new find would make reading aloud relatively simple and free from distraction. Further study is needed of the relationship between format and function, as evidenced also by the frequency of lectional signs and punctuation designed to help with the standard problems of reading from a text without word-divisions. (2) The Greek poetic tradition. As usual, small fragments provide unexpected insights. One grouping seems to come from a comedy, but a comedy that featured Smerdias, the boy friend of the poet Anacreon. Sappho the poetess often provided material for Attic comedy, but she was a figure from the distance. Anacreon actually performed in Athens, in the later sixth century, with all the éclat of a pop star (the Elvis of his time, writes Professor Bing): the so-called Booner vases show him or his imitators in mid- rave. It would not be surprising if comedy later found room for such an iconic figure, whether centre stage or in passing, but this is the first direct evidence that we have. Two other novelties show otherwise unknown poems being read in the third century AD: the more notable brings assonance and even rhyme to verses in which the birds of the air, race by race, mourn the murdered Itys. Both use the hexameter metre which had structured so much of Greek poetry over the preceding millennium. Homer, indeed, the great original, remained at the centre of Greek culture in Christian as much as Classical times. Another fragment shows an amateur (at least one mispelling) constructing a poem on the theme 'Daphne and Apollo' by assembling odd lines of Homer into a (more or less) coherent sequence: this sort of cento, which demonstrates how much Homer its composer knew by heart, was an educational exercise which could develop into an art form, continuing still in the fifth century with the christianising centos of the Empress Eudocia. Even when Egyptian Greeks began to speak Coptic, the Greek language and its classics remained part of elite education, like Latin in Medieval Europe: this volume include a real rarity from the sixth century, a Greek-Coptic glossary to Homer's Iliad which must originally have served a Coptic speaker conning the text for his Greek class. (3) The transmission of texts. Ancient Greek literature survived generation by generation in hand- written copies, and each copy would have its own share of mistakes. As such copying became rarer, in the fifth century AD and after, only a chance group of individual copies survived to be the foundation of the medieval MSS which eventually carried the text on into the age of printing. The papyrological material from the Roman period allows us to see what was circulating, and in what form, before the cull and consolidation of the Middle Ages. The epic poem of Apollonius Rhodius, which narrated a pre-Homeric myth in post-Homeric language, presents a prime example. Our new volume increases the number of witnesses by 20%, and the new papyri contribute new readings to the constitution of the text, for better for worse, in about 35 places. This, for a poet who choses his words very carefully, is a major advance: his original words are gradually being rescued from the corruptions of time. (4) A great estate. This volume continues publication of the archive of the House of Apion, a family of noble estate-owners in sixth century Egypt. Much of the archive consists of fairly trivial transactions at local level: this volume concentrates on documents from the House's central administration in the city of Oxyrhynchus, which cover its estates throughout the area of which that city was capital. The estate was organised in 'overseerships', each containing a group of villages or hamlets, with an overseer who was responsible for its financial management. New material shows that in 535/6 there were at least 26 'overseerships', the skeleton of a very large and productive organisation, whose output was important to the government as well as to the family. The Egyptian economy had a special importance to the Byzantine Empire, since it supplied a large part of the cereals needed to feed the population of Constantinople. In AD 539 the government required Egypt to contribute 8, 000, 000 artabas of wheat (about 250, 000 metric tons); around AD 570 our documents show that the Apion estates were paying about 95% of their wheat production to the government (suggesting that the Apions' own income came largely in cash), which in turn represents 1.5% of the total requirement. But this contribution was not stable: the quantity sent down to Alexandria in one year was, in one case, twice that sent three years earlier. It may be that the regime had demanded more; more likely the difference represents that between a good harvest and a poor one, which in Egypt generally depended on the annual flood of the Nile. Of course the Apion holdings were well supplied with irrigation machines, which the documents show to have been kept in good repair. But the flood is crucial and unpredictable; a low flood leaves fields uncultivated, and a very high flood will drown them. Such information is important for Byzantine historians. A bad harvest in Egypt may mean a bread shortage in Constantinople, and such shortages always cause popular unrest. The accumulating data will help to make the link between Nile-dependent harvests in Egypt and political turbulence in the capital, on the lines of Alain Mikhail's Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt (2011). (5) Picking up the Argonautic myth, we add another in our series of illustrated papyri. The heading ??G???????, written in amateurish capitals, stands above a drawing (black outlines, and wash in at least three colours) of an Egyptian style boat, with a high stern post in lotus shape. The boat has a cabin, and outside it a face looking directly at us; more remarkable, the boat rests on some sort of support with wheels. The editor notes that boats on wheel sometimes formed part of religious processions, and that the Argonauts appear in Lucian's list of subjects for mime; the voyage of the Argonauts might have been shown by wheeling the actors in their boat across the stage. A large loopy shape to the left remains unexplained. Was it a sea-serpent? In any case, the drawing, which is quite primitive, may give us a visual on the ancient mime, the most popular form of entertainment in the Graeco-Roman world and the one least represented (as too vulgar) in our written sources. Research for 2019 has focused on producing The Oxyrhynchus Papyri vol. 85 (scheduled for publication in July 2020). Notable items include (1) A Greek account of Isis' mission to recover the body of Osiris from Byblos, unique in adding further details: Isis summons a (Persian?) prince, Arianes, to help in her war against the Titans. By a strange coincidence, three papyri from Copenhagen, published at the end of 2019, contain a Demotic (Egyptian) version of the same story, including Arianes and the Titans. It is relatively rare to possess the Egyptian version (original) with its Greek version, whether translation or rewriting: such pairs illustrate the cultural amalgam of Greek Egypt, and may help to explain how the Greeks came to invent the novel in something like the modern sense. (2) A Greek translation of the first pages of Justinian's Digest, copied not long after the original Latin version was published. This raises a central question about Justinian's codification of the law of the Byzantine Empire. In principle, translations are forbidden. Yet here is a translation, which also has interspersed brief notes of actual law-cases, each one relevant to the general statute preceding it. Should we conclude that in the provinces of the empire local lawyers and teachers of law nonetheless made translations and basic commentary as best suited their own situation? This contributes also to the general history of the Digest, the earliest surviving codification of Roman law and so basic to the law codes of most European societies. (3) Two documents illustrate the provision of camels for use at Coptos, the southern entrepôt where roads across the Eastern Desert meet the Nile. These roads carry important and profitable cargoes from the ports on the Red Sea through which passes the trade between India and the Roman Empire. Camels provided the ideal desert transport, both for the cargoes themselves and for the maintenance and provisioning of the forts and watering-stations without which the route would have been dangerous and difficult. One document seems to reflect the activity of private contractors; the other documents the expenditure of state funds to buy camels in the Western Desert. This touches the disputed question, how far the state involved itself in the Indian trade beyond simply levying an import duty on its products. It now seems that it did involve itself, if not in the actual trade, at least in providing the caravans which linked the ports to the customs depot at Coptos. Any information about the Indian trade is valuable, since the sea-route functioned in parallel with the land-route (the Silk Road) over many centuries. (4) Our plan to publish graphic work from the papyrus collection will offer a very accomplished painting of the infant god Horus in the Celestial Egg. Was this a book-illustration? or more likely a draft for a wall-painting or wall-relief? In any case, it illustrates the religious syncretism of the Graeco-Egyptian environment and beyond (at a time when the cult of Isis had spread empire-wide). The research conducted in 2020-21 (due for publication in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri vol. 86) covered new papyri from a variety of contexts: (1) 5533 First Apocalypse of James. This apocryphal text, in which Jesus reveals mysteries to his brother James, was known only from two copies in Coptic. The new papyrus, dating from the fifth/sixth century AD, provides fragments of the original Greek version. The date has particular interest, since it proves that this text was being copied, and therefore read, a century or more after the earliest consolidation of the New Testament canon, which excluded this and a large number of other secondary gospels. (2) 5535 Lives of the Diadochoi. Alexander the Great died young, in June 323BC. The inheritors of his empire were known as 'the successors' (diadochoi): in theory his brother Philip and posthumous son Alexander IV, in practice various of his generals who acted as regents. This new text offers short lives of three such generals, with comments on their characters and a note of their years of rule; chronology is fixed in relation to Alexander's expedition and to his death. This is basic stuff; contrast Jerome, who lists only the theoretical rulers and their chronology under the system of Olympiads. The papyrus was copied in the first century AD: thus the text might be more or less contemporary with the Latin short lives written by Cornelius Nepos. In any case, it shows a previously unattested stage of ancient life-writing before Plutarch; and leaves us to ask what audience might have read what is little more than a bluffer's guide. (3) 5539 List of fish. This puzzling text, copied in the sixth century AD, begins with an ABC of fish, one fish for each letter of the alphabet. At first sight, it belongs to the universal genre of teaching alphabets (A is for apple, B is for ball etc). But it is notable that none of the fish are the Nile fish that might be familiar to an Egyptian child: in fact most of them are known to us only from Sicilian and Athenian comedy produced a millennium earlier. Perhaps therefore it should be taken as a jeu d' esprit, to be admired because the well-read author found a fish-name to suit even the more unpromising initial letters. Yet immediately after the list, and in the same hand, we read 'The incantation (?) ... into the left ear; and you spit three times into the eyes'. This takes us into the world of medical magic, whether as protection for humans or against dysuria in horses. What is the connection between this and the fishes? We have no answer. (4) 5540-7 collect straighforwardly magic texts. The content is not surprising, but the ensemble underlines the continuity of the tradition. The wearing of amulets was a pagan practice; early Christian leaders denounced it, but to no effect, and so this group includes a Christian amulet. The same should have been true for the wider uses of magic, but now we have a Spell for the protection of a house, in Coptic, dating from the sixth/seventh centures. (5) 5548-70 collect documents (sales and the like) relating to slavery, which cover the whole period from the first to the fifth century AD. These illustrate some typical occupations of slave-workers (wetnursing and textile manufacture), and some typical life-patterns - slavery from infancy (one was sold at the age of two years), repeated sales (one was resold in Egypt on the very day she was brought to Alexandria by sea), and, for the fortunate, occasional manumission. The new evidence shows very clearly how far the Egyptian market was integrated in the Mediterranean-wide slave-trade, and how that trade deracinated its victims: among those being sold in Egypt were a Cretan, a Mauretanian and a Phrygian. Research in 2021/2 has laid the foundations for The Oxyrhynchus Papyri vol. 87 (publ. mid-2022). This material includes another text of the (apocryphal) Sayings of Jesus; a remarkable collection of Short Lives (in Greek) of Eminent Romans, a century earlier than Plutarch; extensive remains of a handbook of zoomancy (predicting the future from the movements of animals); and two dozen receipts and similar texts which illustrate the day-to-day running of the great feudal estate of the House of Apion. |
| Exploitation Route | These volumes provide unique new data for theologians, classical scholars and ancient historians, and contribute material for synthetic studies of early Christianity, Greek literature and literary culture, and the economic and social structures of the Roman empire and its Byzantine successors. |
| Sectors | Education,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Description | Apart from the interaction with schools and students noted above, our findings have contributed to three public exhibitions in Germany: (1) 'Nero: Kaiser, Künstler und Tyrann', Landesmuseum Trier, 14 May - 16 October 2016: exhibited Oxyrhynchus Papyrus no. 5105, poetic description of the apotheosis of Nero's wife Poppaea (2) '13 exhibitions in 9 rooms', Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 25 November 2016: exhibition by the artist Michael Müller, whose introductory performance (on concepts of love) featured Oxyrhynchus Papyrus no. 2102, a copy of Plato's Phaedrus, with bilingual captions by our RA Daniela Colomo (3) 'The Popes and the Unity of the Latin World', Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen, Museum Zeughaus, Mannheim, 2 May - 17 November 2017. We are preparing Oxyrhynchus papyrus no. 2067, the earliest known copy of the Nicene Creed, to be displayed in this exhibition. We note also the revival of Tony Harrison's 'Trackers of Oxyrhynchus', a play based on the excavations from which our Project began, at the Finborough Theatre, London, 3-28 January 2017 (all performances sold out). The group of magical texts published in vol. 82 continue to feature in the Mail Online, with emphasis on the spells designed to 'possess the heart' of a woman and on the medical recipes that use bird-droppings ('Vulture droppings with honey cool a fever' etc). The knock-about farce published in vol. 79 no. 5189, a remarkable sample of the popular drama that appealed to a Byzantine audience, has been made into an animated film, 'Trashy Humour: A Comedy in Pieces' (5 1/2 minutes), which will eventually be available on line. Further publicity has attached to new texts published in 'The Oxyrhynchus Papyri' vol. 83 (2018). The relatively early fragment of St Mark's Gospel has already given rise to a vigorous religious (more than academic) internet debate about its significance for early Christianity - partly on a mistaken view about its date, which the substantive publication will correct. The drawings of real and fabulous animals feed not only the history of Greek art but the general cultural interest in the unicorn as myth and symbol. In late 2018 the acrimonious debate about the authenticity of the 'Artemidorus Papyrus' has broken out again, and the drawings published by us in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri vol. 83 have been invoked (as we intended) as further proof that the Artemidorus drawings are genuinely ancient: the debate reached the popular press in Italy, see F. Pontani in 'Il Fatto quotidiano' 18.12.2018, replying to a article by L. Canfora in the Corriere della Sera. We have offered another fine drawing (showing the the Argonauts on their ship) in vol. 84, published in 2019. This drawing attracted the attention of Prof. Bernsdorff (Klassische Philologie, Uni Frankfurt), who published a popular account of it, with a colour image, in the culture section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine (9 October 2019). His argument, that the drawing represents a star map, was not helpful: since it shows the Argonauts in a boat on wheels, it's clear that we're looking at a piece of mobile equipment which could be pushed or pulled to show the mythical heroes in a pageant or on stage. But the unique interest of the piece was confirmed, and it remains prime evidence for ancient stage-mechanics. In 2019 we continued to collaborate (via interviews and visit to the papyrus collection) with the theatre group Potential Difference in developing 'Fragments' (by Laura Swift and Russell Bender), an experimental drama about the fragmentation of life, which centres round the fragmentary plays of Euripides, notably our papyrus of his Cresphontes. The play will have its first performance at the Playground Theatre in London, 30 April - 16 May 2020. Oxyrhynchus Papyrus no. 5105, the poem on the apotheosis of the Empress Poppaea, is to be lent to another exhibition about the Emperor Nero, this time at the British Museum (2021). In 2020/2021 the normal pattern of outreach from the collection, and of visits to the collection by overseas scholars, has succumbed to Covid19. But we can report that two of our papyri, the famous painting of charioteers and the earliest surviving copy of the Nicene Creed, will be lent to the Landesmuseum Trier for its exhibition 'Der Untergang des Römischen Reiches', 25 June to 27 November 2022 |
| First Year Of Impact | 2015 |
| Sector | Education,Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Impact Types | Cultural |
| Description | British Academy Major Research Projects |
| Amount | £4,957 (GBP) |
| Organisation | The British Academy |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 10/2016 |
| End | 11/2017 |
| Description | British Academy Major Research Projects |
| Amount | £4,957 (GBP) |
| Organisation | The British Academy |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 10/2017 |
| End | 11/2018 |
| Description | British Academy Major Research Projects |
| Amount | £4,900 (GBP) |
| Organisation | The British Academy |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 10/2019 |
| End | 09/2020 |
| Description | The British Academy Major Research Projects |
| Amount | £24,219 (GBP) |
| Organisation | The British Academy |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 10/2019 |
| End | 09/2024 |
| Description | The British Academy Major Research Projects |
| Amount | £4,900 (GBP) |
| Organisation | The British Academy |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 10/2018 |
| End | 09/2019 |
| Description | Article for wider public |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology caters for general readers interested in Ancient Egypt, and circulates widely. In issue 56 Prof. Benaissa presented two of our texts which illustrate the cohabitation of Greek and native Egyptian culture in the city of Oxyrhynchus. In an early contract for the sale of a house the buyers, with Greek names, contract in Demotic, the late stage of the Egyptian language, and the contract is signed off in Greek by the city bank. Six centuries later, when Coptic, the final form of the Egyptian, was achieving dominance, Egyptians in education were still reading Homer, the great Greek classic, since we have part of a Greek-Coptic glossary to the Iliad. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| Description | Exhibition (Mannheim) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Our papyrus P.Oxy. XVII 2067, a copy of the Nicene Creed dating from the fifth century AD, went on loan to the exhibition 'Die Päpste und die Einheit der lateinischen Welt' (Reiss-Engelhorn Museen, Mannheim, 21 May - 26 November 2017), as a significant document of the early Church. Our curator, Dr Colomo, dealt with all the necessary paperwork, conserved and reglassed the papyrus, and transported it to and from Mannheim, where she supervised its installation in the exhibition and shared techniques and experiences with her German colleagues. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | Guided Tour of the Papyrus Collection |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Media (as a channel to the public) |
| Results and Impact | The Theatre Group 'Potential Difference' is working, in collaboration with the Open University, on a project called FRAGMENTS, a stage work to focus on stories that survive only in odd bits. As happened also with Tony Harrison's 'Trackers of Oxyrhynchus', the authors/directors were anxious to observe the realities of papyri and the papyrological life. They came to interview me, and later visited the Collection, where Dr Colomo showed them samples of papyri covering various literary and documentary fields. They expressed great enthusiasm, and we expect to be in touch with them again as their project takes shape. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | Guided Visit of the Papyrus Collection |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | A group of students working in Theology came from London to visit the Papyrus Collection. Our recent publications have continued to fuel interest in the early history of the Greek bible, for which the Collection is a uniquely rich source. Our researcher, Dr Colomo, showed them some notable items, including early (second century AD) fragments of the Gospels of Mark and Luke and a fragment of Job in which the name of God is still written in old Hebrew letters, although the rest is the Greek translation. Again, this put students with theoretical knowledge face to face with the concrete evidence; they were clearly excited to have the opportunity to handle these fragments (nearly 2000 years old) which allow further understanding of what books of the Bible were circulating, and in what physical form, in the formative epoch of the Christian church. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | Guided tour of papyrus collection (Oxford Society of Bibliophiles) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | The Bibliophiles (graduate students and some seniors) share a general interest in the history of the book, and this visit was designed to show them original papyri as the earliest examples of the book in Europe, with emphasis on the transition from the book-roll to the modern book-form of the codex. There was a profitable exchange of questions and information on both sides. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | Interview for National Geographic Magazine |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | There has been extensive online traffic, especially from the US, about early fragments of the New Testament (see the website 'Evangelical Textual Criticism). This derives partly from the view (false) that the earlier a text of the Gospels, the more authentic it must be; but it also develops into polemic and speculation about who owns such early texts and whether they were acquired legally (Egyptian law now forbids the removal of papyri from the country). The Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection holds twenty-odd Gospel papyri dating from the second century AD, and one that had some how been provisionally (and wrongly) dated to the first century, a sensational item for the bloggers. In the National Geographic 12 (2018) 76-85 Robert Draper published an article 'Bible Hunters: scholars, schemers, and the search for ancient texts', which discussed the general phenomenon and some particular examples. He came to visit our Collection, and interviewed Dr Colomo, whose replies and picture duly appear in the published text (and its various translations). The article has very clearly attracted great interest, and a number of comments. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | Introductory Lecture 'Schools, Pupils and Greek Papyri' (Prof. Gonis) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | The lecture, given at two annual Open Days at UCL, introduced the audience of school-children to the evidence for the teaching of language and literature at Ancient Greek and Roman Schools. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection contains typical examples of the exercises written by children learning to read and write, of the text books used to teach them grammar and composition, and of the vocabularies used by them in preparing 'set books', especially Homer (whose language was as far from them as Chaucer is from us). There were certainly questions, and the teachers thought a valuable occasion in increasing interest in the life and practicalities of the Ancient World. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019,2020 |
| Description | Lecture to Schoolchildren |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | A large group of schoolchildren attended a "Taster Day" at the Greek and Latin Department of University College London, where they heard a talk on our project from PI Nikolaos Gonis. This will have opened their eyes to aspects of the Ancient World far distant from their ALevel syllabus, particularly attractive because the life of the Greeks in Egypt survives in the concrete form of their books and documents, something rarely found in the Classical world. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | Outreach Presentation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | (Zoom) Talk about papyri at UCL Outreach Summer School, 26 July 2021, with about 50 attendees. This was followed by questions and answers, and, I understand, many appreciative comments on how interesting the presentation was. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Participation in school activity |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | The Reading Ancient Schoolroom is a workshop for modern schoolchildren, at which they wear Roman costumes and use replica writing materials (e.g. wax tablets, reed pens, papyrus and the broken pots called ostraca, which was the cheapest material) as a way of understanding how the Greeks and Romans learned to read and write and study their own literary classics. Our RA Daniela Colomo was a visiting performer in January 2016, introducing real ancient papyri being worked on by our Project. The whole idea has proved very popular with schools and education authorities, and another session will be held in June/July 2017. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | https://readingancientschoolroom.com/ |
| Description | Public lecture (Petrie Museum) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Talk 'Egypt, Greek Papyri, and Victorian Britain', part of a series of talks 'Recovering the Past: Egypt and Greece', organised by the Department of Greek and Latin, UCL, at the Petrie Museum (Prof. N. Gonis, 22.11.2017). This talk introduced a general public to the recovery of original Greek papyri in Egypt, which began seriously in the late Victorian period: the finds of otherwise lost Greek literature excited an age in which so many readers had enjoyed a traditional Classical Education, and the finds of Biblical texts, which included early copies of the canonical Gospels and unexpected copies of uncanonical Gospels otherwise lost, impacted on a Christian readership increasingly preoccupied with the archaeology of Christian origins. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | Public lecture (University College London and British School at Athens) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Talk 'The recovery of papyri from Oxyrhynchus', part of a one-day course 'Recovering the Past' for secondary school teachers, organised by the UCL Department of Greek and Latin and the British School at Athens (Prof. N. Gonis, 13.2.2018).The aim here was to introduce teachers of Classical literature, history and civilisation to our huge collection of papyri from Oxyrhynchus, and illustrate how this find has contributed to understanding Greek culture as it was practised and transmitted through the Roman and Byzantine periods. [ |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | School Visit (Oxford) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | Two groups of A-level students from The Oxford Royal Academy (two separate occasions) were given a guided tour of the papyrus collection which is the focus of our Project, introduced to the use of papyrus as the main medium of ancient literacy, and encouraged to handle actual specimens of ancient papyrus as used for the copying of both literary works and administrative documents. The students showed lively interest in confronting written material two thousand years old. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | School visits (Oxford Royale Academy) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | Two groups of sixth form students from the Oxford Royale Academy (19 students in two groups), with their teacher Dr David Rini, visited our workroom, where they had a short introduction to papyrology and handled selected items that illustrate the transmission of ancient Greek literature and the procedures by which this literature was taught already in schools of the Roman period, when the Greek language had already changed substantially from the classical form embodied in their set texts (Dr D. Colomo, 5.7.2017 and 25.7.2017). This was all new to the students, and they were much interested to have contact with written objects two thousand years old. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | Seminar 'Accustomed as I am to public speaking' |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Supporters |
| Results and Impact | The Egypt Exploration Society in London runs a series of Saturday seminars for its members, who are largely members of the public with a strong amateur interest in Ancient Egypt. The Society owns the collection of Greek and Latin papyri from Oxyrhynchus which are the focus of our Project. At this session RA Daniela Colomo introduced the audience to the Art of Rhetoric as it was taught in Greek schools and colleges in Egypt, represented by fragmentary text books and school exercises on which our Project is working. Since acquiring the techniques of public speaking was central to ancient education (since it opened the door to political and administrative promotion), this provided the audience with an overview of a literate society and its common background. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://www.ees.ac.uk/events/index/400.html |
| Description | Student visit (Birmingham University) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Professor Nisbet brought a group of Classics students for a guided tour of the papyrus collection and a viewing of selected original papyri. This primary source of information about the ancient world was new to them, and they had many questions. Prof. Nisbet afterwards expressed his thanks for an experience which enlarged the intellectual horizons of his students |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| Description | Student visit (University of Birmingham) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Guided visit to the papyrus collection for Classics students from Birmingham University (Dr D. Colomo, 17.3.2017). Prof. Nisbet, their leader, wrote "getting to handle the original papyri for the texts [the students] had been working on was a revelation for them. What a day!". |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyTX01ORldQ&utm_source=notification&utm_medium=email&utm_content=edu... |
| Description | Student visit (University of Cologne) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Two groups of visiting students from the University of Cologne were given a guided tour of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Collection (in German, by RA Daniela Colomo), and were introduced to various specimens of Greek books and documents from the collection and also to items being currently worked on by our Project and to the technical equipment used in the conserving, imaging and close autopsy of the material as part of the process of publication. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Student visit (University of Odensee) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Professor Christiansen brought a group of Classics students for a guided tour of the papyrus collection. This introduced them to a primary source of information about the ancient world, with the excitement of viewing original papyri. They engaged with what was to them a new subject, and asked perceptive questions. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | Student visit (University of Southern Denmark) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Two groups of students from the University of Southern Denmark with their professor Dr Sanne Christensen had a tour of our workroom and a handling session, which introduced them to papyri as physical survivors of the Greek and Roman world and their significance as primary source material for the study of Classical civilisation (Dr D. Colomo, 26.4.2017). It was a new area for them, and they asked many questions. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |