One of the frustrating things about working with the earliest codices and codex fragments is the lack of securely dated examples. Palaeography can give a general range, and archaeological context or reuse can sometimes give us a decent terminus ante quem or terminus post quem, but before the era of the dated colophon, there is really not much in the way of securely dated material. One exception to this generalization is P.Oxy. 15 1814, a codex with a very narrow window of production.
This fragmentary folium was once part of a large papyrus codex that contained the Justinian Code. The portion preserved here is a part of a table of contents or index of the main headings from Book One. What makes it special is that it comes from the first edition of the code, which was produced in 529 before being replaced by a revised edition late in the year 534. The text on the papyrus lacks the imperial pronouncements from the years 530-534 that characterize this portion of the second edition. What is more, the preface to the edition of 534 specified that only the revised edition should henceforth be copied and distributed: “it alone shall be consulted in all courts as of December 29…We permit no one hereafter to cite anything…from the first edition (ex prima editione) of the Codex of Justinian.” So the window when the Oxyrhynchus codex was produced is small, basically 529-534 CE.
Thus, the script of the papyrus can serve as a relatively fixed point of comparison for the Latin uncial (the so-called “B-R uncial”).
It’s a pity that most of the Greek writing on the page is lost or obscured by damage, as in the example above.
The papyrus is also interesting from a codicological standpoint. It’s quite big. It is fragmentary, but its full dimensions seem to be preserved: The page was about 23 cm wide and 33 cm high, very roughly on par with the Louvre Cyril (about 21.5 cm wide and 35.5 cm high), or the Milan Josephus, (about 24 cm wide and 34 cm high), both also usually assigned to the sixth century. All in all, a very fortuitous survival.
Parts of ancient books were recycled in a variety of different ways, but I don’t recall having seen anything quite like this before. It’s a portion of a parchment folium from a codex that contained some works of Demosthenes (P.Amh. 2 24, TM 59644). What we have here is the top of a column containing the beginning of the second Philippic with a title at the top: ⲕⲧ ⲫⲓⲗⲓⲡⲡⲟⲩ ⲃ. It was cut from a folium of a two-column codex and then notched across the top edge and part of the left edge. It is a little strange, then, that it seems to be torn rather than cut at the bottom.
Portion of a parchment folium from a codex containing works of Demosthenes (P.Amh. 24); image source: The Morgan Library and Museum
The book from which it was poached must have been a very nicely produced codex. The script is a Biblical Majuscule with an appealingly light touch. The script is typically assigned to the fourth century, although the fifth century also seems possible to me. But I’m most curious about the afterlife: What was the intended use of this little item? It seems pretty clear that it was deliberately cut from a folium. But why the notches? Was it a book mark? Some kind of decorative item? It’s a fascinating piece.
Another very interesting item in the epigraphic collection at the Baths of Diocletian in Rome is a portion of a sarcophagus that contains a nice depiction of a menorah. It is typically assigned to the third or fourth century CE, and it is often used as an illustration in books.
Sarcophagus panel with menorah; Museo Nazionale Romano, Terme di Diocleziano, inv. 67611; image Brent Nongbri 2026
The slab is positioned in a spot that is not on the main walking path in the museum and is easily missed. It is also positioned near a wall, which is a shame, because the back of the slab is also inscribed and is somewhat difficult to see in its current position:
Back side of a sarcophagus panel with menorah; Museo Nazionale Romano, Terme di Diocleziano, inv. 67611; image Brent Nongbri 2026
It is clear enough that this is a floor panel from a church, and googling the legible part of the inscription turns up Vincenzo Forcella’s 1874 edition of the inscriptions from the church of San Lorenzo in Damaso in Rome, among which is this one:
FRANCISCO DE BELLO MEDIOLANESI MERCATORI INTEGERRIMO QVI VlXlT ANNOS L. IO. ANDREAS DE MARCHESIIS MEDIOLANĒ B. M. P.
The inscription, dedicated by one Milanese to another, is said to date to the 16th century, and the source is listed as “Dal Galletti (Cod. Vat. 7911, c. 17, n. 76),” that is a volume of clippings from the records of Pierluigi Galletti (1722-1790), who recorded many church inscriptions. Happily, this manuscript has been digitized by the Vatican Library.
De Bello’s inscription is also mentioned in a 1729 publication on San Lorenzo in Damaso by Giovanni Battista Bovio. If Bovio and Galletti saw Francisco de Bello’s slab in situ in the church in the eighteenth century, then it would have probably been removed during one of the substantial nineteenth-century interventions in the church. The slab was known to be a part of the Kircher collection at least as early as 1879, when it appeared in the guide to the museum written by Ettore de Ruggiero (1839-1926), and it was probably in the Kircheriano as early as 1866, when it was mentioned by Raffaele Garrucci (1812-1885). It passed into the Terme collection when the Kirchner collection was dispersed in 1915.
I’m not aware of other cases of Christian reuse of Jewish funerary art in exactly this way. I would be grateful to learn of more examples.
During a recent visit to the Museo Nazionale at the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, my attention was caught by a funerary urn made from a type of stone with very interesting patterns [[Update 27 Feb. 2026: I am informed that the stone is astracane dorato (castracane), a north African marble.]]
Funerary urn of the physician Claudius Melito, Museo Nazionale Romano, Terme di Diocleziano, sala VIII, inv. 115187; image Brent Nongbri 2026
Funerary urn of the physician Claudius Melito, Museo Nazionale Romano, Terme di Diocleziano, sala VIII, inv. 115187; image Brent Nongbri 2026
The inscription on the urn is also remarkable:
Ti(beri) Claudi Athenodori f(ilii) Qui(rina) / Melitonis / Germanici medici1
Of Tiberius Claudius Melito, son of Athenodorus, of the tribe Quirina, doctor of Germanicus
The label in the museum identifies the “Germanicus” of the inscription as the general Germanicus (15 BCE–19 CE), father of Caligula, which seems reasonable (though Herbert Bloch seems to have understood the title to refer to the emperor Claudius, i.e. Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, 10 BCE–54 CE2). The label also connects the physician Claudius Melito to a reference in Galen, which seems a bit less certain to me. Galen just briefly mentions a “Melito” who was said to be the author of a medical recipe (ξηρὸν σηπτὸν τὸ Μελίτωνος, De compositione medicamentorum per genera, Kühn xiii 843).
The inscription was found in 1934 along the Via Praenestina (200 meters beyond the 8 km mark). The original publication also mentions another inscription found together with the urn of Claudius Melito. This piece is also now on display in the Baths of Diocletian but in the didactic area near the entrance:
Funerary stele the historian Claudius Herma, Museo Nazionale Romano, Terme di Diocleziano, inv. 115188; image Brent Nongbri 2026
The inscription is a bit more legible in the drawing published in the original edition:
Ti(berius) Claudius Herma / qui Sideropogon / appelatus est histo/riarum scriptor
So, this is the funerary stele of the Claudius Herma, a writer of histories who is called “Iron beard” (a latinization of what must have been a Greek name, σιδηροπώγων, but which is, as far as I know, not attested).
It is interesting to see these two Tiberii Claudii found together, a medicus and a scriptor historiarum, two people of learned professions probably buried in the same tomb.
G. Iacopi, “Nuove iscrizioni di Roma e del suburbio,” Bulletino della Commissione archeologica del Governatorato di Roma 67 (1939) 13-26. This is the original edition of the inscriptions and also the source of the two drawings in this post. ↩︎
H. Bloch, review of L’Année Épigraphique: Année 1940 in American Journal of Archaeology 49 (1945) 627-629. ↩︎
As 2025 comes to a close, one last article is coming out:
“Mise-en-page Between Roman Egypt and Medieval Europe: The Recette de Saint-Remi and the Layout of an Early Greek Parchment Codex (P.Ant. 1 27),” Fragmentology 8 (2025), 155-169.
This article (available open access!) originated from a survey of the manuscripts usually regarded as the earliest non-Christian codices. There are a number of interesting things to observe in the corpus, but one item that stood out to me was P.Ant. 1 27 (TM 59621), a nicely preserved parchment folium containing a portion of Demosthenes, De corona. The original editors (C.H. Roberts and J.C Dancy) had assigned it to the third century, but it had more recently been reassigned to the second century.
Roberts and Darcy commented upon the layout of the text in two neat columns with wide margins: “The total effect is thus that of a spacious and well-proportioned page.” In fact, the layout of this manuscript aligns shockingly well with a set of somewhat idiosyncratic instructions for laying out a page preserved in the margins of a medieval Latin manuscript (BnF Latin 11884). The manuscript dates to the late ninth century, and the marginal addition, the so-called Recette de Saint-Remi, was probably added in the tenth century.
P.Ant. 1 27 with the layout suggested in the Recette de Saint-Remi superimposed
This similarity between the layout of P.Ant. 1 27 and the recipe has some important implications: Either this recipe for laying out the page has very early roots and the technology of the parchment codex had already reached a highly developed state by the second century, or P.Ant. 1 27 has been assigned a date that is perhaps a bit too early. The article contains an investigation of the dating of this codex, which turned up some fascinating details about the archaeological context of the papyri excavated at Antinoopolis during the Egypt Exploration Fund campaign of 1913-1914. This in turn led to a series of interesting discoveries relating to the Antinoopolis papyri that I will outline in a couple other articles that will hopefully be out soon. A good new year to all!
Thinking about the letters of Augustine reminds me of one of the more interesting manuscripts I encountered this year. Among the many remarkable manuscripts in the Cairo Genizah is Cambridge University Library ADD.4320. It’s a collection of fragments of a palimpsest with an upper text containing masoretic notes on various texts from the Hebrew scriptures and a lower erased text that has been identified as a collection of Augustine’s sermons.
The hand of the Latin script is a clear uncial that has been assigned to the sixth century, making these folia some of the oldest surviving copies of Augustine’s writings.
Cairo Genizah palimpsest with sermons of Augustine, detail of lower Latin text; Cambridge University Library Add. MS. 4320a; image source: University of Cambridge Digital Library
The bookmaker who reused the parchment from the codex of Augustine’s sermons seems to have just cut the bifolia in two down the middle, rotated the resulting folia 90 degrees, and folded them in half to make the new quires.
An open-access article by Hugh Houghton from 2019 provides a fresh treatment of the fragments and supplies the relevant bibliography. Houghton also poses a couple very interesting questions:
“How did a luxury codex of Augustine’s writings come to be reused some three or four centuries later for writing Hebrew masoretic lists before being deposited in the genizah in Cairo? Might still more pages come to light from the same document?”
The codex of Augustine’s sermons is one of several unambiguously “Christian” books that were found in reuse among the genizah fragments (that is to say, the content of the books was Christian, even if the last owners or users of the books did not identify as Christian). These include folia containing a lectionary with gospel readings, folia containing Acts and 1 Peter, and a leaf of Origen’s Hexapla.
It’s not hard to imagine that any serious scholar of the Hebrew Bible in medieval Cairo (Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or “other”) would be happy to have a copy of the Hexapla for consultation. But the exact reasons for someone in the Jewish community having a copy of Acts and the Catholic epistles in Greek or a collection of Augustine’s sermons in Latin is less easy to discern. It’s a reminder of how much we still don’t know about the Jews of medieval Egypt despite the wealth of evidence provided by the Genizah finds.
When I teach about ancient letter writing, one of the things I emphasize is the precariousness of sending letters any great distance in the Roman world. Without an organized postal service, the delivery of letters could be quite haphazard. I just came across a very nice illustration of that point that had escaped my notice until now. It occurs in one of Augustine’s letters to Jerome written in the year 403 (Augustine, Letter 71, Jerome, Letter 104):
“And so, since I already sent two letters, but afterward received none from you, I chose to send the same letters again in the belief that they have not arrived. Even if they did arrive and your letters rather were perhaps unable to reach me, send once again those letters that you already sent if you perhaps kept copies. If not, dictate again something for me to read, provided that you do not, nonetheless, delay to answer this letter because it has already been a long time that I am waiting for it.”1
Most of this letter is dedicated to a fascinating discussion of Jerome’s text-critical activities and their contemporary reception, but this side note about the sending and receiving of letters raises some interesting questions about “original copies,” duplicate copies of letters sent to others, and the possibility of having to dictate an entire letter again.
“Quia ergo duas iam epistulas misi, nullam autem tuam post ea recepi, easdem ipsas rursus mittere volui credens eas non pervenisse. Quod si et pervenerunt ac fortasse tuae potius ad me pervenire minime potuerunt, ea ipsa scripta quae iam misisti iterum mitte, si forte servata sunt; sin minus, rursus dicta quod legam, dum tamen his respondere ne graveris, quod iam diu est ut exspecto!” K.D. Daur, Sancti Aurelii Augustini: Epistulae LVI-C (Brepols, 2005), p. 36; English translation by Roland Teske, The Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century: Letters 1-99 (New City Press, 2001), p. 266. ↩︎
When I think of the Biblical Majuscule, what usually comes to mind is the script of the famous Greek Bible, Codex Sinaiticus, which is usually assigned to the fourth century (though the early fifth is not out of the question). But as Guglielmo Cavallo demonstrated in his classic 1967 study, Ricerche sulla maiouscola biblica, examples of this script persist until the very end of the eighth century and perhaps beyond. I recently had occasion to look into a very late example of the Biblical Majuscule, and I find myself a little confused.
It involves one of the “new finds” from St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, Sin. ΝΕ gr. ΜΓ 012, a fragmentary parchment bifolium that is usually said to be securely dated to 861/862 CE. The bifolium belongs to Sin. gr. 210, a gospel lectionary (ℓ844 in the INTF numeration). The bulk of Sin. gr. 210 was reported as missing in 1983, but it was photographed in Kenneth W. Clark’s microfilming project in 1949. The date given for the manuscript in the microfilm is eighth century, which seems sensible given the script of the codex (a sloping pointed majuscule). The challenge is that the date given in the colophon preserved in Sin. ΝΕ gr. ΜΓ 012 is said to be 861/862 CE, which would place the codex (and its scripts) squarely in the ninth century rather than the eighth. This manuscript would then be (to the best of my knowledge) the latest precisely dated example of the Biblical Majuscule (at present, I think the generally accepted latest securely dated example is Vat. gr. 1666, a codex containing the Dialogues of Gregory the Great with a colophon dating to 800 CE).
Here is an image of the page in question from Sin. ΝΕ gr. ΜΓ 012:
Sin. ΝΕ gr. ΜΓ 012; image source: D. Harlfinger et al., Specimina Sinaitica (Berlin, 1983), figure 1
But note that the date is partly (actually mostly) obscured by a hole. Here is an image:
Detail of dating formula in Sin. ΝΕ gr. ΜΓ 012; image source: D. Harlfinger et al., Specimina Sinaitica (Berlin, 1983), figure 1
The editors read the dating formula as:
έτους κόσμ[ου ἀπὸ ἀ]δὰμ/[ϛτ]ο / ·
The date is thus restored to /ϛτο, world year 6370. Based on the assumption that the world was created in September of 5509 BCE, the equation would be 6370–5509 = 861 CE (or maybe 862, since we can’t read the month in the colophon). I can see and accept the omicron (70) for the decade digit, and the millennium digit logically must be a digamma (6000), but the crucial number, the century digit, is completely missing due to the hole in the manuscript. I’m not sure if there is anything else about this codex that would determine that the letter/number to be supplied in the lacuna must be tau rather than sigma, which would give us a date of 761 (or 762) CE.
One issue that may be problematic for restoring a sigma is that 761/762 would be, as far as I know, the earliest example of a precisely dated Greek colophon. At present, I believe the earliest example is again, Vat. gr. 1666, which is dated to April 6308 = 800 CE). So the Sinai codex would either be the earliest precisely dated Greek colophon or the latest example of the Biblical Majuscule, depending on whether we restore a sigma or a tau. Either way, an important milestone.
So, the manuscript is securely dated, in a sense (either 761/762 or 861/862 CE). The INTF Liste describes the date as “861/62?” I wonder if this is the reason for the question mark.
At the Capitoline Museum in Rome, there are a series of rooms dedicated to finds from the various garden areas uncovered in the area of the Esquiline hill in the late nineteenth century. Tucked away in a corner of one of these rooms are some bits of painted fresco with Greek writing in a very nicely executed script. The fragments were found in situ on the exterior of the so-called Auditorium of Maecenas in 1874 (the actual function of this building is open to debate). The mounting and lighting of the fragments in the museum are a little less than ideal, so please excuse the shadows, reflections, and the general quality of the image:
Lines of Callimachus on plaster; Capitoline Museums A.C. inv. 32363; image: Brent Nongbri 2025
The pieces are mounted in a way that indicates how much text is missing in between the two large chunks. We know the amount of missing text within tolerable limits because the lines are known to be an epigram attributed to Callimachus. A drawing was published in 1875 and an edition appeared in 1878.
And in fact there is a new edition of the epigrams of Callimachus, fresh off the presses (October 2025) by Susan Α. Stephens and Benjamin Acosta-Hughes. Here is their full text of the epigram:
If of my free will, Archinus, I had brought a revel, blame me a thousand times, but if I have come against my will, permit my rashness. Unmixed wine and love compelled me, of which the one dragged me, the other would not allow me to let my insolence go. When I came, I did not shout out who I was and whose son, but I kissed the doorpost. If this is wrong-doing, I do wrong.1
Stephens and Acosta-Hughes provide an excellent and thorough line-by-line commentary, as they do for all the epigrams (just one quibble: In connection to these plaster fragments, they write that “the inscription no longer exists,” but here it is! The didactic material at the museum gives no indication that these pieces are facsimiles).
The script is quite interesting. It was applied with a brush but shows an attempt to mimic the effects of the use of a stylus for serifs, occasionally giving some vertical lines ends that look like arrows (e.g. tau as ↧).
Detail, lines of Callimachus on plaster; Capitoline Museums A.C. inv. 32363; image: Brent Nongbri 2025
The script is similar to that found in some surviving papyri. It features letters of a basically square modulus, with only the phi really breaking bilinearity. The alpha is often written in three clear strokes, the epsilon often shows a little bit of space between the curve and the central stroke, and the phi has a somewhat compressed loop and prominent foot. The hand reminds me of some Herculaneum papyri, such as P.Herc. 1507:
P.Herc. 1507; image source: G. Cavallo, Libri scritture scribi a Ercolano (Cronache Ercolanesi supp., 1983), plate LIII
It also brings to mind certain Jewish manuscripts, such as P.Fouad inv. 266:
P.Fouad inv. 266; image source: Z. aly and L. Koenen, Three Rolls of the Early Septuagint (Habelt, 1980), plate 18
Both of these manuscripts have been assigned to the first century BCE, and it seems plausible that our lines of Callimachus could have been written in the same period (i.e., during the first or second phase of the building’s use), although a later date cannot be ruled out.
And where, exactly, were these lines displayed? The excavators give us a description:
“Some passages of a Greek epigram, which, with a brush dipped in black, had been written on the white plaster of the external wall of the semicircle, near the middle of its curve. The point where these verses could be read is about two-thirds of the height of the wall; so high that, in the present state of the excavation, one would have to get up on a ladder; but when the building was in its original condition, that is to say, sunken the ground up to more than half its height, it was possible to write comfortably in that spot, standing in front of the wall. The part of the plaster on which the epigram had been written, although torn into pieces and lacunose, was detached, by the care of this Commission, and is preserved among its collections of antiquities.”2
The top plan and reconstructed profile drawing offered by the excavators give a reasonably good idea of the position of the verses “on the external wall of the semicircle.” Notice the hypothesized ground level shown at the right side of the profile drawing.
Top plan of the “Auditorium of Maecenas”; image source: Vespignani and Visconti (1874), Tav. XI
Reconstructed profile of the “Auditorium of Maecenas”; image source: Vespignani and Visconti (1874), Tav. XI
It’s nice to learn of the existence of these fragments, and it’s wonderful to be able to recover their context, at least to a certain extent.
Susan A. Stephens, Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, Callimachus: The Epigrams (De Gruyter, 2025), 271. ↩︎
V. Vespignani and C.L. Visconti, “Antica sala da recitazioni, ovvero auditorio, scoperto fra le ruine degli orti mecenaziani sull’ Esquilino,” Bullettino della Commissione Archeologica Comunale di Roma (1874) at 162: “Alcuni brani di un greco epigramma, il quale col pennello intriso di nero era stato scritto sull’ intonaco bianco del muro esterno dell’ emiciclo, quasi nel mezzo della sua curvatura. Il punto in che leggevansi questi versi corrisponde a circa due terzi dell’ altezza del muro; talchè, nello stato attuale del disterro, sarebbe necessario ascendervi con una scala: ma quando l’ edifizio era nelle sue condizioni primitive, cioè a dire, internato nel suolo per più della metà di sua altezza, poteasi comodamente scrivere in quel sito, stando in piedi avanti la parete. La parte dell’ intonaco in cui l’ epigramma era stato vergato, sebbene ridotta in brani e mancante, venne distaccata, per cura di questa Commisione, e si conserva fra le suo raccolte di antichità.” ↩︎
For the first time since it opened, I took the walk on the new pathway through the imperial fora in Rome. From the Roman Forum you can go past the curia (where, at the moment, a portion of the Magna Mater exhibition is on display) and on a raised path through the Forum of Nerva and the Forum of Caesar, under the Via dei Fori Imperiali and into the Forum of Trajan. The perspective from well below street level was fascinating, but it was a lot to take in.
Certainly a highlight for me was the Forum of Nerva. The poet Martial locates book sellers in exactly this area, and provides names for a couple of them (translations courtesy of Shackleton Bailey):
“Look for Secundus, freedman of lettered Lucensis, behind Peace’s entrance and Pallas’ Forum” (libertum docti Lucensis quaere Secundum limina post Pacis Palladiumque forum, 1.2)
“No doubt you often go down to Argiletum. Opposite Caesar’s Forum there’s a shop (contra Caesaris est forum taberna) with its doorposts completely covered by advertisements, so that you can read the entire list of poets at a glance. Look for me there. Ask for Atrectus (that being the name of the shop’s proprietor), and he will hand you from the first or second pigeonhole a Martial, shaved with pumice and smart with purple, for five denarii” (1.117)
With these passages in mind, it was striking to see the “You are here” didactic sign:
Of course, the didactic material doesn’t tell you exactly which ground level you’re standing on, but it was still very helpful to be able to get a sense of the space at this lower level, and I hope the accessible areas expand to include the Temple of Peace. But even as it is now, it’s definitely worth a second visit.
Variant Readings 