Papyrology
Papyrology is the branch of classical studies which decrypts documents Greek and Latin from various sites of Egypt and operates mainly in the data. It appears as the study of a society of notables in Greek or Hellenized East very specific environments, the late Egyptian world with its old social and religious traditions. Some dictionaries and encyclopedias consider papyrology is the paleography , but palaeographers specifically interested in writing papers, while papyrologists study their contents.
Summary |
Origins of Papyrology
Papyrology owes its existence as a scientific activity to the convergence of a very specific historical factor and a geographic factor for a specified period.
The historical factor
To find papyri and other documents in Greek Egypt , the Greeks must have lived there permanently. During the millennium that ends with the Arab invasion in the mid- seventh century , the Greek language in Egypt was the language of power, administration. With varying degrees of generalization, it is the language used by groups economically or socially dominant, with the exception of the higher clergy of Egypt under the Ptolemaic dynasty. In -332 , the Macedonian Alexander the Great , who was trying to conquer the Persian Empire of the Achaemenid , was welcomed by the Egyptians as a liberator. Before leaving, he founded Alexandria , which became the largest city of the same name which he will sprinkle the conquests that lead up to the Indus. He died prematurely at Babylon and his generals divide the empire under the nominal lanterns successors of the conqueror. The Macedonian Ptolemy , friend of youth and Alexander War, chose Egypt, and -304 , it takes the step by proclaiming himself king of the territories it will soon submit to its authority, the Egyptian , the Cyrenaica , Cyprus and Palestine , among others. This set is managed in Greek at all levels and is headed for Alexandria, which soon became a center of Greek intellectual importance. The Macedonian dynasty of Ptolemies survive as long as the expansion of Rome in the East.
In -30 , Cleopatra VII committed suicide to avoid include the triumph of her conqueror, Octavian, later Augustus. Egypt becomes a Roman province, but under the exclusive authority of the emperor who wishes to control this granary. Only the army and senior judges representing the Roman emperor in Alexandria use the latin. The Greek language is the language of running the country. Soon even the remaining population of Egyptian language ceases to use the demotic script (see below) using the Greek language for all she has to write or have written by a scribe. From the fourth century , things change a little. Byzantine Egypt, which has largely Christianized, will soon depend emperors of Constantinople when the Roman Empire is split into an Eastern and a Western Empire. Greek language will remain the management of the country's elite and small towns continue to receive an education in classical Greek and even to produce works of Greek quality. But - especially because the language of Egyptian Christians need to read their sacred texts in translation - to create an alphabet Egyptian alphabet adapted from Greek, Coptic alphabet (see below). But the Greek is the language of running the country, that of Alexandria and the administration of a large part of provincial notables. This role will quickly decrease from the Greek, then disappear after the Arab conquest.
The historical factor thus shows that Egypt was preparing the tens of thousands of Greek papyri that have already been published. It does not explain why we could find them, while almost nothing has been preserved of its kind in the rest of the Hellenistic kingdoms or empires Roman or Byzantine, who had yet social and administrative structures more or less similar.
The geographical factor
The geographical factor explains this feature. To find papyrus, it was that two contradictory elements coexist: an advanced society that pratiqut writing, inhuman and dryness of soil so that the papyrus does not rot on the spot. Except in the far north, for its Mediterranean coastline, Egypt belongs to the vast Saharan desert. But the rainwater in a vast area of the African equatorial and tropical fought their way to the Mediterranean by ascending from south to north through what we call Egypt, a huge green ribbon where men quickly mastered the annual flooding of the Nile. People lived if possible at the edge of the desert not to start too many cultures, and among the waste (of course they reject the side of the desert), we find letters from all sorts of tattered books, contracts expired, accounts, etc.. Papyrologists and, forgetting that in their childhood, their mother was forbidden to play in the dumps and especially to read the letters to others, pounced on it as misery in the world. The cemeteries were installed as far as possible within the confines of the desert cities. When, in the Hellenistic period, the ncrotaphes were making cardboard boxes mummy, they bought up old archives or papyrus on which individuals to dispose of. Papyrologists and, just as ill-bred, broke up these funds to loosen the layers of papyrus. They have done worse. The priests of the village of Tebtynis in the oasis of Fayoum desert entrusted to the mummies of sacred crocodiles, living symbols of the great god Sobek. They were careful to stuff the stomach gutted piously of these charming creatures with balls of papyrus scraps, then swaddling corpses with rolls of papyrus, the texts were no longer of interest. What do you think happened when papyrologists have discovered this sacred burial ground? An impressive array of beautiful solid volumes of documents on the southern villages of Fayoum; we know them better than many of our medieval villages. Alexandria, unfortunately, is in the wetland, and there is never unearth a papyrus, but hundreds of public and private documents sent to Alexandria in Egypt (Alexandria was not among them administratively) if they were found had the privilege to finish their careers in a dump at the edge of the desert.
History of Papyrology
Only in the last decade of the nineteenth century that has really organized as Papyrology major discipline of science from Greco-Roman. It owes its name to the fact that at that time considerable quantities of papyrus from Egypt arrived in Europe. It was first necessary to decipher and publish them, but at the same time the quantity and quality of data that were discovered in Egypt Greco-Roman did we glimpse the possibility of systematically exploiting all these data by creating gradually working tools, methods of critical evaluation of raw data and summaries. Papyrology modern was born.
Since 1788 it has published a document on papyrus that led to the Vatican , a short-lived curiosity. The expedition of Bonaparte in Egypt, the country opened to scholars in all disciplines. This is especially the Greek inscriptions, including the famous trilingual Rosetta Stone, which enabled the French AJ Letronne in 1823 to draw an initial sketch of the history of Egypt under the Ptolemies and Roman Emperors. Meanwhile farmers learn the value of Egyptian papyri they find. The trade in antiquities will feed a few museums and libraries, and soon appeared the first volumes of papyrus, very deserving, but few provided important texts. It was reported earlier the second phase of the discoveries of papyrus. From 1877, farmers in search of nitrogenous fertilizers exploited the land of ancient sites discovered in the Fayoum and masses of documents quickly joined some major collections, like those of Berlin , to London , but especially Vienna.
Soon began Phase 3 of discoveries, scientific excavation of sites capable of providing texts. One of the fields of excavation papyrological most fruitful is that of Oxyrhynchus , in Middle Egypt (see Oxyrhynchus papyri ), the publication was in 2003, its 68th volume and the following are announced! The findings of Phase 3 corresponds in time to the processing of meritorious work of the pioneers in a discipline organized. This was readily characterized by the creation of sophisticated instruments and work very close relations between papyrologists from all countries. These relations, under the sign of amicitia papyrologorum, gave birth to the International Association of papyrologists , which has its headquarters in Brussels to the Association Egyptological Queen Elizabeth, before Queen Elizabeth Foundation Egyptological.
The name that the circumstances gave papyrology should not hide the fact that the papyrologist works on all Greek and Latin documents from Egypt, whatever the medium of writing. In addition to the papyrus rolls made by juxtaposing square thin longitudinal sections of spinal papyrus, clandestine excavations or scientists have produced thousands of ostraca. A ostracon is a shard of pottery, usually a fragment of an amphora; this cheap material for writing easily without taking the shard inkstand in his left hand. You can find anything on these ostraca from school exercises or small private messages to the tax receipts or even drawings. It is no coincidence that the first book in 1899, has definitely raised the Papyrology as an autonomous discipline and designed the methodology and critical rules, is the collection and review of all of Egypt and ostraca of Nubia known at this time. This monument is due to Ulrich Wilcken who will be the grand master of Papyrology until the beginning of the Second World War. Among the woodblocks, note particularly the mummy labels, which gave the name of the dead, its origin and possibly the site where it is wanted. The inscriptions on stone and countless graffiti on walls or rocks are a rich data source written the most varied, they have the advantage of being complementary to the contents of the papyri and ostraca, which respond to other purposes and are intended to communicate more or less limited in time and the intended users.
The types of documents papyrological
Once the acquisition of papyri and ostraca in the major Western collections had reached a certain density, which struck the researchers was that we could use is a material that is almost completely absent from other parts of the Hellenistic East, of the Roman Empire and the former Byzantine Empire. These witnesses Greeks of Egypt are broadly divided into documents relating to power and his administration and records under the private activity. The boundary between these two categories is rather blurred.
The "official"
They can sometimes come from the highest authorities. Thus the impressive specifications of the tax forms out of the office of the Minister of Finance and Economy of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, or a letter from the emperor Septimius Severus , or the conferring of privileges to a Roman adviser to Anthony where we read the order for the handwriting of Cleopatra VII. But we almost always dealing documents much more modest: the copy of letter a senior official with the adjoining premises ordered to arrest an offender shabby, the certificate attesting that this obscure peasant is in good standing of fatigue on the canals irrigation, or the declaration of a birth or death. There are orders to carry out censuses of persons, domestic animals or property, but especially the many statements that are derived from and each time a valuable social record. Tax receipts are well documented, the very image of a system where, under the Romans, for example, the lower classes pay the heaviest tax capitation.
Conflicts between people or with the administration have attracted extensive documentation, laws and regulations, complaints and verdicts, which have raised with the contracts governing economic relations and social, a particular branch of Papyrology, papyrology legal. Many of the documents it handles, particularly the contracts covered by some aspects of the documentation they are due to private initiative of individuals, even if these acts follow standards more or less restrictive. Papyrology Legal ultimately raises a major problem, the coexistence of different rights linked more or less the status of persons concerned, the Egyptian law, Greek law and, later, Roman law.
Documents "private"
We find the same variety in private documents, written records of the most disparate of everyday life: the accounts of a large estate or inventory of a kitchen, the countless private letters with their expectations, complaints, concerns or compliments to pass on to friends and acquaintances, invitations to a party or a wedding , querying a Oracle or recommendations from a top monastery , etc.. These are all samples that were allowed to develop a sociology of a bicultural society, where Greeks and Hellenized the one hand, and Egyptians, on the other hand, living in both media more or less waterproof, but environments where Over time, intermarriage and certain aspirations, as the phenomenon of religion (the Egyptian gods are just for the Greeks of Egypt form their own local gods) or the desire to have careers and create bridges.
The documents and language
Documents have authors like people who have benefited from very different levels of schooling or have a knowledge of Greek highly variable. These texts represent diversified samples of the living language practiced at some point in the entire non-homogeneous social components. We can follow the evolution of the Greek way to the modern Greek in terms of phonetics, morphology and syntax for a millennium. But we must first decipher what type of user is the author of a non-classical Greek or the head of a spelling error, often a sign indicating a linguistic phenomenon. Because language evolves differently according to social class. The notable high school, sometimes after graduate studies at Alexandria, speaks and writes one Greek mostly conservative, at least another Greek than the Egyptian peasant who has learned by ear a hundred words that he injures forgetting to decline, because the variation does not exist in Egyptian.
The Literary Papyrology
What is uprooted hundreds of sand from Egypt copies, or more often strips more or less reduced, Greek literary works, sometimes also Latin, Demotic or Coptic. The most spectacular finds were those who offered us, in whole or in large part, important works of Greek literature that had been lost over the centuries. For example, possessed more than the shapeless bits of comedy happy ending and frustrated love born fourth century BC. BC in Athens, Greece while such lost, represented first by his imitations of the Latin Mass and the comedy western that followed them, is still fertile in literature and film or television drama worldwide. Was found in Egypt many comedy Menander , first master of this kind, and they are works of quality that still hold the stage. The discovery of a lost treatise of Aristotle , the "Constitution of Athens" has revolutionized the history of archaic and classical Athens. Thanks to the papyrus of Egypt, it finally knows best poets Sappho and Alcaeus , Bacchylides and as a speaker or Posidippe Hyperides , we discover the kind of poetry with Mimiambes of Herondas. The list could go on, especially with longer or shorter fragments of lost works, sometimes writers who were more than a name, sometimes also some local rhyming. Found rollers illustrated, first treaty of geometry or astronomy Ptolemaic period, more novels and poetry collections. Thus, among nearly 250 pieces of medical treatises, we found fragments of two seagrass. Moreover, papyrology delivered a large number of musical fragments, greatly enriching our knowledge of ancient Greek music , with passages of Euripides or Aeschylus , but also Msomde Crete (Pean Berlin), or Anonymous. The oldest known Christian hymn ( IV century ), dedicated to the Trinity, was sent to us on papyri with ancient Greek musical notation.
Many Greek literary papyri belong to works that we already have because our libraries in the West had inherited from Byzantium, the Renaissance, they have another interest. They are much older than the medieval manuscripts that have preserved these books because they do not come from the academic Byzantine which are generally the source of these manuscripts. They often enable us to correct the alterations that have damaged the later medieval manuscript tradition. The case of Homer is even more astonishing. The text of the two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey , we read under the symbolic name of the old bard, has been fixed and comments from Greek philologists Museum (Temple of the Muses) of Alexandria under the Ptolemies. Of cardboard mummy have preserved fragments of the two oldest epics, they preserve variants, mostly additions, which shed light on the evolution of these anarchic epics before the time when the Alexandrian philologists have fixed the text, that we still read in our classrooms. The papyrus and ostraca school sometimes retain fragments more or less battered classical authors, Homer often appears.
The Latin literary papyri are much fewer and rarely well preserved, but their interest is similar: the discovery of unfamiliar texts and witnesses of known works, eg, Virgil.
The papyrus also illuminate the literary papyrologist terms of sociology. In selecting texts, he discovered that throughout the millennium, the youth of affluent backgrounds have the right to education gymnasium , a sort of sanctuary of Greek moral and physical education. This education is the key to social and economic privileges that families want to pass to their offspring. The choice of works is instructive. Homer, especially the Iliad, remains the basic text as it was in Athens and in most Greek cities, it is by far the largest collection of literary papyri. Demosthenes and Euripides are well represented, but one looks in vain for a work of Egyptian inspiration. The findings are grouped guess libraries more than respectable community leaders. The upper middle class of small Greek towns in Byzantine imperial age or appears to us as well as the soil which are from some great writers like Nonnus Panopolis of the fifth century. But in the middle Egypt, even at more modest social, education of young Greeks, increasingly Hellenized backgrounds, based on a purely Greek cultural background. Numerous papyri and ostraca school show.
The estate Papyrology
Egypt will be found copies of the Gospels , apocryphal gospels as Protoevangelium Jacques, and other Christian religious writings, which sometimes go back to the second century. We have witnesses so that the oldest manuscripts available to us before the discoveries papyrological and even Christian sources that had been lost over time.
Other papyrology "Egyptian"
The Demotic Papyrology
During the millennium of Egypt concerning papyrologists, the indigenous population continued to speak their language, an Egyptian late. The Rosetta Stone , which will be one key to deciphering hieroglyphics , a decree was trilingual. He was voted by a synod (conclave) of the priests of the great Egyptian temples -196 , shortly after the coronation rite after the pharaonic Ptolemy V. One version was written in hieroglyphics in the sacred language, makes it a dead language, but prestigious, another version in the Egyptian language alive, we called the demotic , the "vernacular" and finally a third version was written in Greek, the language of the royal management of the country. The Egyptian language is also alive in the writings of everyday life, with a script that already existed before the arrival of the Macedonians, it was called the demotic script, that is to say "popular writing" while the Greek documents call writing "native". The accumulation of documents and literary demotic dmotisants allowed to develop working tools and methodology can be called a "Demotic Papyrology.
The Coptic Papyrology
As stated above, the Egyptian population has returned an alphabet unto himself, when Christianization came from Alexandria, accelerating in the country from the third century and requires dissemination of the Gospels and other writings Christians for the Copts (deformation of the word "Egyptian"). The Coptic alphabet complements the Greek alphabet with some signs borrowed from the demotic to make unfamiliar sounds Greek. He transcribes the "Coptic", the final state of a large Egyptian dialects large slice of the population continues to speak. Will long Coptic language Coptic Church, before being replaced by Arabic. Our libraries of the West possessed medieval Coptic manuscripts, which had allowed the study of the late Egyptian. Knowledge of Coptic is the foundation of success when Champollion was able to decipher the complex system of hieroglyphs. Soon the Coptic alphabet will be used in secular activities. The proliferation of Coptic documents from everyday life, especially that of monasteries, has prompted the birth of a Coptic Papyrology, with its specialists and its instruments of work, despite the recent date of the development of our documentary subjects.
The interest of demotic and Coptic papyrology fact that today papyrologists "pure" have increasingly tended to reflect this in their documentation parallel to the Greek language. This is even more natural that dmotisants coptisants and often had first training papyrologists. Moreover, some of them are familiar with either of these Egyptian papyrology whether they are attracted to the Ptolemaic period to the first, or the Byzantine period to the second. For example, studying the life of a monastery, it makes little sense to question the Greek papyri and ostraca without using the equipment brought by the Coptic correspondent. This is especially pleased that the sociological component of Papyrology is largely marked by the coexistence within the same framework politicogographique live cultures of two very different and, to some extent, the low permeability relative to another.
In Egypt, papyrus was used for a long time before Alexander the Great to the sacred texts, and secular funeral, their study is of Egyptology. Similarly, it was found to Elephantine at the first cataract , Aramaic papyri of the Jewish garrison left by the king of Persia had posted along the southern border of Egypt in the fifth century. These documents and other documents Aramaic latest found in Egypt are of Semitic Studies.
A lot of papyrus Pahlavi held in Berlin in the original brief occupation of Byzantine Egypt by the Persians (616-627).
The gradual occupation of Egypt by the Arabs to Islam from 639 explains the discovery of documents on papyrus or paper written in Arabic language whose use will become widespread over the centuries, even in Christian circles. Greek will gradually disappear private documents, but it survives for some time as the language of Chancery, as in the record from the offices of governor Kurrah bin Sharik at Fustat (Cairo) for pagarque (pagus or officer of a township) of Upper Egypt. The papyri are treated by Arab Arabists. But the existence of documents in two languages requires the cooperation of papyrologists Hellenist specializing in the Near East in the High Middle Ages and specialists in Arabic Papyrology has found a resurgence in recent years.
found Papyrus from Egypt
Apart from Egypt, special circumstances have allowed the preservation of Greek papyri fortuitous. At Petra and Nessan, the documents reveal some aspects of a Palestinian Christian, near Byzantine Egypt. Found Greek papyri from the Roman period in Syria, particularly in the Roman garrison at Dura-Europos.
The carbonization of the papyrus in oxygen-starved environment has ensured the preservation of papyrus sometimes in the delta , but also outside of Egypt. Thus, in a tomb in Macedonia Derveni, we found a roll of Orphic fourth century BC. AD (from a religious cult initiation, the Orphism ). But the discovery is best known in the eighteenth century carbonised papyri from Herculaneum. They come from a library of Greek philosophy submerged by hot mud that rushed down the slopes of Vesuvius when torrential rain succeeded the eruption of 79. The papyrus carbonisrent slowly, but their discovery, presented serious problems for the unwinding and decipher them. Today, reading is facilitated by infrared photography, and most recently, the press reported that the spectacular advances in the use of specific infrared rays will read with considerable success carbonized papyri from Herculaneum but the papyrus for writing erased from Egypt. See also Related articles
External Links
(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5, rated)
Loading ...