Over on his blog, Larry Hurtado has posted a link to his list of “Christian Literary Texts in Manuscripts of Second & Third Centuries.” When he first published a version of this list in his 2006 book, The Earliest Christian Artifacts, it provided a much needed succinct listing of the earliest surviving Christian texts and made it a lot easier to think about this entire corpus of material. That said, there are some features of the list that are worth pondering further. Continue reading
Palaeography and the Hawara Homer: Part 1
In an earlier post, I talked about the archaeology of the Hawara Homer (LDAB 1695), a papyrus roll containing the second book of the Iliad found with an unadorned mummy during Flinders Petrie’s excavations in Hawara in 1888. In this post, I want to talk a bit about the dating of the manuscript, which provides a nice illustration of how things functioned in the early days of palaeographic dating of ancient Greek handwriting. The handwriting of the papyrus is striking in the regularity of the letters, which were clearly executed by a skilled copyist.
Sample of writing from the Hawara Homer (Bodleian MS Gr. Class A.1 (P); Image from the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents
The Bodmer Papyri: 3D Views
In an earlier post, I provided an up-to-date inventory of the papyrus and parchment books from Roman Egypt in the Fondation Martin Bodmer. I’ve been working on these books for a while, and I recently partnered up with the Bodmer Lab (University of Geneva), a digital humanities initiative that is making the materials at the Fondation Martin Bodmer more widely available. My colleague Daniel Sharp and I are working to produce a detailed catalog of “P.Bodmer” material, and we’re hoping to have this data, along with high-quality digital images of many of the books, online later in 2018.
Another aspect of this effort involves experiments with 3D visualization. Continue reading
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Anton Fackelmann and Cartonnage
Since I began this blog midway through 2017 with a post about Anton Fackelmann and some of the papyri he allegedly removed from mummy cartonnage, I thought I might close out the old year and open up the new with one more post on Fackelmann’s papyri and their somewhat less-than-clear provenance. Continue reading
The Tura Papyri: Archival Footage
Tura Codex IV, Didymus the Blind, Commentary on Genesis
In my previous post on the Tura Papyri, I mentioned that the books are said to have been discovered in 1941 during the clearing of quarries south of Cairo for use by the British military. The earliest detailed account of the discovery, which wasn’t published until 1946, describes this cleaning operation as follows: Continue reading
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Ancient Book Covers and “Cartonnage”
As a follow-up to my last post on the development of the use of the French term “cartonnage”: It looks like it was the late 1950s when the term “cartonnage” began to be applied to the material sometimes used in ancient book covers. Today, this is a common usage among papyrologists. Some scholars of bookbinding have not been entirely happy with this development. Continue reading
Variant Readings 