The Papyrology of the Roman Near East: A Survey (original) (raw)
1995, Journal of Roman Studies
Not all students of the Roman world may have realized that, following extensive discoveries in the last few years, Egypt has ceased to be the only part of the Empire from which there are now substantial numbers of documentary texts written on perishable materials. This article is intended as a survey and hand-list of the rapidly-growing ‘papyrological’ material from the Roman Near East. As is normal, ‘papyrology’ is taken to include also any writing in ink on portable, and normally perishable, materials: parchment, wood, and leather, as well as on fragments of pottery (ostraka). The area concerned is that covered by the Roman provinces of Syria (divided in the 190s into ‘Syria Coele’ and ‘Syria Phoenice’); Mesopotamia (also created, by conquest, in the 190s); Arabia; and Judaea, which in the 130s became ‘Syria Palaestina’. These administrative divisions are valid for the majority of the material, which belongs to the first, second and third centuries. For the earlier part of the per...
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The archaeology of Graeco-Roman Egypt and its sister-discipline papyrology were born together from the same colonial stew of illicit and sanctioned excavations that produced massive quantities of papyri and artifacts from Egypt during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1920's, a small number of researchers began to record findspots and stratigraphic levels for the artifacts that were added to the collections of their respective institutions and to produce cohesive syntheses of the papyri and other objects brought out of Egypt. The following decades, however, were marked by processual trends that solidified methodological and philosophical divides between the two disciplines as each sought to define its role in the creation of knowledge about Egypt's Graeco-Roman past. The disciplinary divide became more pronounced, so that, by the 1990's, much of the cross-disciplinary dialogue consisted of accusations of neglect for the concerns of the other field.
Notes on Papyri from Roman Egypt
Pylon, 2022
§1 Recently published in P.Messeri is a small fragment from the Musées royaux d'Art et d'Histoire de Bruxelles containing the very end of one column and the beginning of the next column of a list of names, most of which have Jewish associations ( P.Messeri 32, I-early II; Tav. XXVII). In column 2, line 9, the editor reads σο κ , expanded as the heading Σοκ(νοπαίου Νῆσος), which is followed by the name Ἰακούβιο[ς …] (the last two letters are difficult to confirm on the plate). While such an abbreviation of the village name finds parallels (e.g. BGU 3 762.1), the sigma in this case sits awkwardly apart from the following letters, and the presence of line ends suggests that the letter instead belongs to the previous column: ο κ is then left as the common abbreviation ὁ κ(αί), indicating that Iakoubios was a second name (his first is presumably lost at the end of the previous line). With this new reading, the document loses its association with Soknopaiou Nesos and the Arsinoite nome (though not its onomastic and cultural interest).
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