Bancroftiana, Number 120 Spring 2002: Papyrus Comes of Age

Papyrus Comes of Age

The Tebtunis papyri may be one of the University of California's better kept secrets, but Todd Hickey, the Bancroft Library's new papyrologist, is working hard to change that. "Here you have this tremendous scholarly resource," Hickey says, "and for the bulk of the last century, it's been ignored. First and foremost, I see myself as an advocate for this collection."

The Bancroft's papyri were a gift of Phoebe Apperson Hearst. Unearthed in Egypt from the Fayyum town of Tebtunis in the winter of 1899-1900, they came to Berkeley in 1938 after a sojourn in Oxford, where their excavators, B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt, and others had been preparing them for publication.

Papyrus fragments from Roman Tebtunis, still in their 1900 excavation tin.

Four volumes (in five parts) of the Tebtunis Papyri have now appeared (the last in 1976), but these have hardly put a dent in what was an incredibly rich find of papyri. Fewer than 2,000 pieces out of (approximately) 30,000 — the largest number of papyrus fragments in the New World — have been published. The vast majority of the unpublished texts have never even been studied. "This makes the job incredibly exciting," says Hickey, a Chicago history Ph.D. who comes to Bancroft from the University of Delaware. "Every time I open up a folder or one of the excavation tins, I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to find. The papyrus that I pull out to work on may just be a run-of-the-mill tax receipt, or it might be a lost piece of Greek literature."

The lack of attention in the past may be exhilarating for today's scholar, but it has had negative consequences for the health of the texts themselves. The tide was turned when the Bancroft joined the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS) Project (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/projects/digital/apis/index.html) several years ago, and Hickey sees conservation as a continuing priority. "Obviously we've got to ensure that these texts are around for future generations of scholars and students." To help with some of the more challenging pieces (for example, unopened rolls or unprocessed mummy cartonnage), Hickey has arranged for the Library's conservator, Lorna Kirwan, to study with Andrea Donau at the Vienna Papyrussammlung.

Hickey will also be teaching in the Departments of Classics and Near Eastern Studies. "This is a critical component of my position," he says. "If we want to ensure the health of the collection, if we want the study of papyri, that is, papyrology, to flourish at Berkeley, the faculty and students must find them relevant if not essential. To do this, we must transform their study from an arcane subdiscipline of Classics, one often perceived — sometimes justifiably — as excessively concerned with minutiae, into an interdisciplinary field that has something to say to philologists, historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, et al." Is this a tall order? "I don't believe so," says Hickey. "It's simply a matter of exposure, of knocking down the barriers. Most people are quite receptive when they recognize the often unique opportunities that the corpus presents. No other body of evidence tells us as much about the society and economy of the ancient world."

Hickey was hired as a result of the creation of the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri, a new Organized Research Project that is being supported for a period of up to ten years by the Vice Chancellor of Research. The Center has gotten off to a good start. "Thanks in no small part to the support and assistance that I've received from both the Bancroft and the faculty, we're doing well," reports Hickey.

Todd Hickey, Papyrologist

"We've already received a generous $25,000 gift from a private foundation, which has allowed us to hire two graduate student assistants, to support Lorna's training, and to invite Professor Dorothy Thompson of Cambridge, a scholar with extensive knowledge of the collection, as our first Distinguished Visiting Lecturer. An undergraduate apprentice will join us in the Spring. My colleague Arthur Verhoogt [at the University of Michigan] has a fifth volume of the Tebtunis Papyri well advanced, and I've begun work on a sixth one. We're building relationships on campus, in the community, internationally. Every morning I wake up excited to go to work — this collection has that much potential. I won't rest until it's completely realized."

For more information on the Tebtunis Papyri, see: