This fragment of Greek papyrus (P. Tebt. 268) confirmed the antiquity of Dictys of Crete's account of the Trojan War previously only known from the Medieval Latin manuscript tradition. |
Reading Papyri, Writing History
Homer’s account of the Trojan War was not the only one circulating in antiquity. By the Middle Ages the most popular description of the war was based on a Latin text describing itself as a translation of an eyewitness account given by Dictys Cretensis (Dictys of Crete). According to the prologue, Dictys fought against the Trojans and later recorded the war (in the Phoenician alphabet) on sheets of bark that were placed in his tomb upon his death. A thousand years later in the reign of the Roman emperor Nero, the prologue continues, an earthquake opened the tomb and the sheets were discovered and transliterated into Greek and subsequently translated into Latin.
Modern scholars were understandably a little dubious. For many years, they disputed whether the Latin text really represented an ancient text with a Greek, let alone Phoenician, original. Many scholars were content to assign it a medieval date.
The matter was decided in the Egyptian desert. In the early part of the last century, excavators working on behalf of UC Berkeley unearthed a sheet of papyrus from a Roman house at Tebtunis. The find confirmed the antiquity of the Greek Dictys account. It provided a date no later than 250 CE for the sheet of papyrus (P.Tebt. II 268), indicating a date probably no later than 200 CE for its original composition, and certainly not excluding the Neronian date given by the prologue.
The Dictys account is just one of a great many papyrus finds that have added to the body of ancient literature that informs not only classical studies, but also part of the literary heritage of the West. Found in context and read along with the documentary texts for which the Tebtunis collection is famous, such literary texts can be used to write social history—to (re)unite literary texts with their usually obscure ancient audience.
Conservation Assistant Lorna Kirwan remounts a papyrus fragment in glass. This piece of papyrus and almost two thousand others were placed in destructive plastic mounts in the 1940s. |
The Center for the Tebtunis Papyri (CTP) was formed in 2000 to create scholarly focus and support for the study and decipherment of the largest collection of papyri fragments in the Americas. Dr. Todd Hickey, the collection’s curator and papyrologist, joined CTP the following year and has set about to realize its goals. CTP’s first priority is to preserve the papyri for future generations of students and scholars. This year the Center was able to double the number of papyri in its online digital catalogue (for a total of 2,590 records), and approximately a third of the collection’s 30,000 loose fragments were inventoried and placed in acid-free sheets. This past summer, Bancroft and CTP arranged for the Library’s conservator, Lorna Kirwan, to spend four weeks studying with premier papyrus conservator Andrea Donau at the Vienna Papyrussammlung, and in the early fall, the Library purchased six custom cabinets that will safely house the papyri, while at the same time rendering them more accessible for study. |
Curator and Papyrologist Dr. Todd Hickey pulls a box of mounted papyri from the CTP's new, custom made papyri cabinets (in Cal-blue!). |
With world-class Classics and Ancient History and Mediterranean Archeology programs, Berkeley is well situated to train students in the technical aspects of working with papyri and to incorporate the information they yield into studies of ancient society, religion, economics and literature. Through the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program, Farhad Mahmoudi, Estelle Hofschneider, Molly Allen, Arica Bryant, Susan Duong, and Paul Waite have assisted CTP with a variety of tasks, including cataloging, interleaving, and digital imaging. Dr. Leonidas Petrakis and Monte Vista High School student Grace Jackson have also contributed to the interleaving work. Graduate students William Short, Ken Jones, Brigit Flannery, Chris Hoffman, and the present author, Elisabeth O’Connell, have participated in these projects as well, and are also editing a selection of texts for publication. These editions will appear in volumes six and seven of The Tebtunis Papyri, a series that has been dormant since 1976. Volume five of the series, Arthur Verhoogt’s, Regaling Officials in Ptolemaic Egypt is forthcoming.
Last spring, Hickey taught a graduate seminar in papyrology, and he and Professor Donald Mastronarde have introduced papyrology to the undergraduate curriculum this spring in their “Graeco-Roman Egypt” and “Papyrus and Greek Literature” courses, respectively. Hickey will also continue teaching Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language in which the Greek alphabet replaced the cumbersome Egyptian script. Through the Moffitt Fund, Bancroft was able to purchase two fragments of Coptic texts (one on papyrus, the other on parchment) for CTP, pieces associated with the late antique archive of the Egyptian bishop Pisenthius. The addition of these Coptic texts expands the breadth of the collection to include examples of all the languages and scripts commonly used in Graeco-Roman Egypt. Through its recently inaugurated annual lecture series, CTP is hoping to involve the community as well. In April 2002 and April 2003, Cambridge Professor Dorothy Thompson and King’s College, London Professor Dominic Rathbone presented CTP’s first and second public lectures respectively. Willy Clarysse of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven has accepted an invitation to lecture in 2003.
Ancient History and Mediterranean Archeology graduate student Elisabeth O'Connell examines a papyrus fragment. |
The Center has also been active within the national and international papyrological communities. Stanford and Sacramento State University have already joined a regional partnership initiated by Hickey, wherein the Center will collect records and images of papyri held by institutions in the western United States and incorporate them into the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS) web database. The goal is to make material from disparate collections accessible to scholars working throughout the world. In 2004, Berkeley will host the American Society of Papyrologists (ASP) second Summer Seminar, a six-week program that will introduce graduate students and junior faculty to prominent North American collections and provide them with the skills to use papyri in their research. |
It has been a productive (and busy) year for CTP. Readers will be able to keep abreast of further developments (and opportunities) on CTP’s new website (http://tebtunis.berkeley.edu), which is set to launch in summer 2003.
—Elisabeth O'Connell
Volume 122
Spring 2003
Table of Contents
Reading Papyri, Writing History
From the Director: A Bancroft Library for the 21st Century
California Children's Books at the Bancroft Library
Hazards of the Forests fo Watsonville-- as reported by Regent Arthur Rodgers
Bear in Mind: The Many Lives of a Library Exhibit
The Last Portrait of Mark Twain
