The Classical Manuscript Tradition

Written by: Martha Thompson

For thousands of years humanity has been recording more than we realise. Whether it be Linear B tablets showing trades in Ancient Mycenae, extracts of epic poetry in Byzantium or a shopping list on the back of a receipt, the written word is an intrinsic part of the way our society functions. The key question when considering this is then, how do we still have records of these texts from over 2 millennia ago, and where do they come from?

The first literary papyrus dates back to the Egyptian Middle Kingdom and was discovered by the French orientalist Achille Constant Théodore Émile Prisse d’Avennesat at Thebes in 1856. The papyrus is named after him and is now called the Prisse Papyrus and is housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. While we have other papyri fragments that date to earlier than this, the Prisse Papyrus is the oldest of its kind. Though perhaps this is not the best example of how these fragments have been preserved for hundreds of years.

Many medieval manuscripts of classical texts came to the European libraries late, and Homer was not read in early Middle Ages Europe; Europeans had effectively lost the ability to read Greek. So, to see how these texts first came back to us, we must go back to 1488 when the first printed copy of Homer in the original Greek was published by Demetrius Chalcondyles (an Athenian who came to Italy to teach Greek to the humanists of the Renaissance) in Florence. That being said, some other records did exist; Petrarch owned a copy of Homer’s Iliad (an epic poem telling the story of 2 weeks in the 10th year of the Trojan War) but he wasn’t able to understand a word of it, he said that the text was “dumb to me as I am deaf to it”.

A better example may be the Venetus A manuscript, found by Jean-Baptiste-Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison in 1788 in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. Many argue that this is the most important Greek text of the Iliad ever printed and all modern editions are descendants of this text. It is estimated to have been written down c.950 CE in Byzantium and is made up of 654 pages decorated with Byzantine images of heroes and additional notes (called the A Scholia) which are said to be the editorial notes of the scholars at the Library of Alexandria in the second century BCE. The Byzantine scholar who wrote this manuscript included in the A Scholia remarks made to him not only about the text of the Iliad itself, but also about previous commentators on it. While Villoison suggested that this was the essence of the work of a single Homer, the idea already existed that Homer was not a single person, and that the Iliad and Odyssey were not a product of an individual genius, but instead composed by a series of poets over generations. His discovery of this text was the Copernican moment in the debate of the Homeric question (whether Homer was one man, or many) and is an indication of a continuous tradition of creating new manuscripts of classical texts.

Continuing chronologically and maintaining the theme of Homer, we have the papyri found by William Flinders Petrie in 1888 when he began to dig in a necropolis at Hawara (near the Fayum depression, west of the Nile Valley in Egypt), which was the site of a pyramid build by Pharah Amenemhat III in the 19th century BCE. On the 21st of February of that year, he found a scroll of papyri under the head of a woman who was buried there, though she was not named. Revered Professor Archibald Sayce (an Oxford Assyriologist) studied these papyrus fragments and found them to contain parts of the text of Books 1 and 2 of Homer’s

Iliad and as such they are referred to as the Hawara Homer. Somewhat remarkably, the text of the Hawara Homer is impressively close to the text of Homer that was passed down to the Byzantine scholars assembling the Venetus A manuscript eight hundred years later. The Hawara Homer are now housed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and the rest of the papyri found were given to the Egyptology Department at UCL.

Despite the brilliant nature of this discovery, it is one of many. The Oxyrhynchus papyri, a collection of hundreds of thousands of fragments that date between the third century BCE and the seventh century CE, were found in modern day al-Bahnasa in Egypt by the Oxford classicists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt between 1896 and 1907 (though others were also found by John de Monins Johnson in Antinoopolis between 1913 and 1914). This is the largest collection of its kind. The texts found at al-Bahnasa were written in a wide range of languages, including Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Demotic (an ancient Egyptian language that did not use a hieratic or hieroglyphic script), Aramaic, Pahlavi, and Coptic (another Egyptian language that used the Greek alphabet with a few additional characters). Despite their age, these fragments of papyrus are in remarkable condition, and this is due to where they have been. They were found in what used to by the town dumps of ancient Oxyrhynchus and while from above they looked like very little (just mounds covered with layers of sand) these dumps provided the ideal conditions for preservation. They were buried in what is the perfect layer of sand, where ground water cannot reach it, and the lack of rain in this region means that the papyri have been kept perfectly dry and therefore preserved for centuries.

Grenfell and Hunt found these dumps entirely by chance, but the contents of the papyri covered a vast range of topics, from mathematics, drama, and historiography to early copies of the Old and New Testaments. These texts have taught us a huge amount, both by providing remarkably whole fragments of key classical texts such as Euripides’ Bacchae (a tragic play written in fifth century BCE Athens), but also about life in ancient Oxyrhynchus. For example, we know where Anicetus the dyer lived in the town, as well as Philammon the grocer. We can figure out how much farmers were charged when they brought goods to the market. And we know that Juda needed two nurses to turn him over when he fell over a horse and that Sabina hit Syra with a key which meant Syra was in bed for four days.

Looking at many of the most influential manuscripts that survive of classical texts we see the many ways in which they have made their way through history to us. Be it in a seemingly ignorable ancient town dump, found by accident in a library in Venice, or in an Egyptian tomb, the survival of these texts is key to our understanding of the classical world and the beliefs of those who lived in it.

Bibliography

Nicolson, Adam. The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters. William Collins, 2014. https://www.ees.ac.uk/papyri. Accessed 4 October 2023 https://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php?cat=11#entry_2045. Accessed 6 October 2023 https://oxyrhynchus.web.ox.ac.uk/waste-paper-city. Accessed 4 October 2023 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/GrandLatMisc/hawara/. Accessed 6 October 2023

SLT Aims for 2020 Part 1

In this week’s edition of WimLearn, Malin, Ariana, Alice and Hannah discuss their aims for the year in their roles on the 2020 Student Leadership Team.

Malin (Sports Captain):

As sports captain for this coming academic year, I am absolutely thrilled to be back as a sporting community. In terms of the aims that I (and the P.E department) have, we really want to place an emphasis on instilling a strong sense of camaraderie between everyone. Excitingly, despite the tightened rules and regulations, we will be back into teams and squads (e.g. netball, hockey, rowing, swimming etc…) which I’m sure will be very fun for everyone involved (albeit that no external fixtures will be taking place).

The only bad aspect of playing sports at school is- I’m sure you can agree- having to wear the smelly and unpleasant sports bibs. This will no longer be an issue! Not only will bibs we washed frequently, but equipment will also be thoroughly disinfected. I hope that everyone is as excited as I am to be back playing sports with friends, and if anyone has any questions feel free to reach out to either the PE department, me, or any of the new sport specific captains!

Ariana (Admissions Ambassador):

As Admissions Ambassador my aims for this year include: improving the buddy system by getting the new girls and the girls present in the school to write interests and pair the girls using similar interests, have more conversations with girls about to go into year 12 to help them prepare for the jump from GCSE to A Levels and set up a society for girls joining the school to help them feel more comfortable in their first few weeks at WHS.

Following on from this I want to improve the inter-year bond between Year 11s going into Year 12 and the year above them by having more meetings (either online or in person due to COVID-19) when they know which form they are going to be with in order to help them adjust quicker.

Lastly, I would like to try set up a virtual tour for Wimbledon High School so that we can accommodate the COVID-19 situation allowing new parents to tour the school online as well as hopefully encouraging more prospective international pupils.

Alice (Editor in Chief of Unconquered Peaks):

As Editor in Chief of Unconquered Peaks, it is my aim for this year to publish articles that both inform and challenge readers. In the age of the Instagram infographic, which has become particularly ubiquitous in the wake of the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, nuance is more important than ever. It is important to be up to date with current affairs, but equally vital to understand issues and question things instead of taking things at face value.

My wonderful team of writers and I will endeavour to inspire critical thinking and a desire to explore. As well as offering interesting perspectives on the issues of the day, we will also be writing about things that we’re passionate about, from exciting areas of academia to our favourite books and films. I hope that Unconquered Peaks will keep everyone inspired and amused during this strange time!

Hannah (Charities & Partnerships rep):

The world as we know it has been turned upside down, in unimaginable ways over the past 6 months. Major charitable events (including the London Marathon and Glastonbury!) were cancelled, causing thousands of charities around the country to lose millions of pounds.

However, despite this adversity there is always hope. This year we will continue to support our partner charities, particularly Faith in Action, following the catastrophic increase in homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is an unimaginable situation not having a roof over your head, or not knowing where your next meal will come from, and our alliance with London homeless charities is something I am keen to strengthen.

My primary aim for the coming academic year is to achieve this ongoing support; by raising awareness of individual causes both within school and our wider communities, encouraging everyone to get involved and take time out of their week to help others, and increasing our fundraising output by working towards the new charity targets.

This year, more than ever following the global pandemic, there will be more and more people in need, and we will strive to make this the best year yet for both fundraising and strengthening our partnerships here at WHS.