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
