Over the years, I’ve had many occasions to talk about the manufacture of papyrus rolls. I typically describe them as fairly simple artifacts–several individual sheets of papyrus pasted together to form a roll. And a papyrus roll is relatively simple when compared to a codex, with its different materials and many parts. But I’ve recently been trying to make a good quality papyrus roll, and it has turned out to be a little more complicated than I anticipated. The main issue is just the size. Papyrus rolls in antiquity could be quite long.
It can be a little challenging to get a sense of just how long these rolls actually were. Even when they have survived intact, they tend to be cut into pieces so that they can fit in reasonably sized glass frames. But when you see a well preserved roll laid out, you get an impression of the scale of these things. Here is a recently discovered Hieratic papyrus roll that is 16 meters (≈52.5 feet) long. Note that most of it is still rolled up near the head of the gentleman with the magnifying glass:
The “Waziri Papyrus” partly unrolled; image source: MENA
I’ve been experimenting with making a shorter roll. My original idea was to aim for a roll of about 10 meters, what we might think of as an “average” papyrus roll of the Roman period. I had 25 papyrus sheets (30 cm high and about 40 cm wide). So far so good. But I immediately faced several hurdles:
Simply having access to a large enough space to make something 10 meters (≈33 feet) long
Making a wheat flour paste that is the right consistency–thick enough to hold the sheets together but not so thick that it becomes overly stiff when dry
Applying the paste evenly and fully without creating overflow
Keeping the sheets properly aligned when pasting, especially as the roll becomes longer
Having a sufficient number of suitable weights to keep pressure on the kollēseis (the overlapping areas where the sheets are pasted together) while drying
These factors combined to make me a bit less ambitious and to trim the roll size by half. My first attempt is still drying. I’ll post later with the results.
Thanks to Mike Holmes for informing me that the most recent issue of Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik contains an article reporting the results of radiocarbon analysis of five papyrus manuscripts and one parchment manuscript that took place about a decade ago:
Daniel Stevens, “Radiocarbon Analysis of Six Museum of the Bible Manuscripts,” Zeitshcrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 227 (2023) 153-160.
This follows upon the publication of the results of AMS analysis of the “Wyman Fragment” of Romans in 2022:
Daniel Stevens, “The Wyman Fragment: A New Edition and Analysis with Radiocarbon Dating,” New Testament Studies 68 (2022) 431-444.
Among the pieces just published in ZPE are some Egypt Exploration Society distribution papyri that were sold by Dirk Obbink to Hobby Lobby in 2010 (these are not the stolen Oxyrhynchus Papyri but rather pieces that were “distributed” to museums, universities, and seminaries after they were published in the early twentieth century). Also included are: P.Oxy. 15.1780 (New Testament P39, a distribution papyrus apparently not bought through Obbink), the Bodmer Psalms codex (P.Bodmer 24), and a piece of the Tchacos-Ferrini Exodus codex (MOTB PAP.000447).
There are some noteworthy features in this set of analyses. Two of the papyrus documents are dated internally from their textual contents: MOTB PAP.000379, a distribution papyrus from Tebtunis dated to 44 CE and P.Oxy. 12.1459 a document dated to 226 CE. Five samples were taken from P.Oxy. 12.459 and sent to five different labs. The results from four of the labs were in reasonable agreement, while the fifth lab produced results that were far too early. I’ll have more to say about this analysis later.
But for now I want to focus on one of the literary pieces that has interested me for a long time, P.Bodmer 24, a copy of the Psalms in Greek that the Greens purchased in a private sale from the Fondation Martin Bodmer (now MOTB MS.000170). This codex has been assigned to different dates over the years on the basis of its scripts (the codex is the work of two copyists). The original editors, Rodolphe Kasser and Michel Testuz, assigned the codex to the first quarter of the fourth century, without excluding a slightly earlier date.1 Similarly, Eric Turner described P.Bodmer 24 as “iii/iv.”2 Colin H. Roberts, however, assigned the codex to the second half of the second century on the following grounds:
“The first hand is of a common type of which a good example is my Greek Literary Hands 17a, which can be dated to the middle of the second century a.d. It is a hand of which the beginnings can be seen in Schubart, Pal. 3 abb. 79 and a later development in P.Graec.Berol. 20. The second hand is also of a familiar type; it has something in common with Schubart’s Pal. abb. 82 and with P.Graec.Berol. 31. I should have no hesitation in saying that the Bodmer Psalms was written in all probability in the second half of the second century a.d.“3
The results of the radiocarbon analysis shed some light on the discussion. The sample tested yielded an age of 1780 ± 20 radiocarbon years BP. A result in this range when adjusted using the latest calibration data (IntCal20) produces two discontinuous ranges of calendar dates:
The resulting ranges of calendar dates, 231-261 CE or 277-339 CE, are consistent with the palaeographic estimates of Kasser/Testuz and Turner, but these results cast doubt on the second century date assigned by Roberts. Thus, although the radiocarbon analysis does not give us a precise date (in fact it yields two discontinuous ranges that span just over a century), the AMS analysis does give us useful information that substantially improves our knowledge of the age of this codex: The papyrus used to make it was most likely harvested between about 230 and 340 CE.
Rodolphe Kasser and Michel Testuz, Papyrus Bodmer XXIV: Psaumes XVII – CXVIII (Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, 1967), 22: “il ne serait pas impossible de la dater de la fin du IIIe siècle; il sera plus prudent, cependant, de l’attribuer à une époque un peu plus tardive: disons, grosso modo, le premier quart du IVe siècle.” ↩︎
Eric G. Turner, The Typology of the Early Codex (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 21, 59, and 171. ↩︎
Jean-Dominique Barthélemy, “Le Psautier grec et le Papyrus Bodmer XXIV,” Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie, 3rd series, 19 (1969) 106-110, quotation at 106-107. ↩︎
A few months ago, I observed that two stalks of papyrus from the same plant could produce quite different colored sheets of papyrus. I’ve also noticed that the same stalk of papyrus can produce strips that, although they look the same when freshly cut, have different colors when dry. I wondered whether this color difference might relate to the area of the stalk from which the strips come (the top end or the root end).
I figured this was easy enough to test using a stalk from one of the papyrus plants I grew from seeds earlier this year. The stalks on my plants are quite skinny, but I’m still able to make small sheets from them. So, I cut the stalk into sections and then made strips from them. When freshly cut and shorn of its green husk, the whole stalk has a translucent grey-ish white color. But after a few minutes in the air, the portion nearer the root began to turn a reddish color. This effect diminished as you moved up the stalk toward the top, where a lighter yellow color developed.
The different colors of a papyrus stalk after a few minutes of exposure to air; lighter near the top, darker near the root
This pattern of coloration became more pronounced as the strips dried. The reddish area at the bottom dried to a fairly dark brown color after 24 hours. Strips from the upper part dried to a much lighter color. The image below shows small sheets made from middle strips on the left and lower strips on the right (the upper-most strips are simply too narrow to use effectively). The color difference is fairly stark:
Papyrus sheet made from strips from the middle of the stalk (left); papyrus sheet made from strips from the lower portion of the stalk (right)
I tried this on three stalks from the same root cluster and had similar results. I also observed a slightly less pronounced version of this phenomenon on strips cut from larger stalks from the local botanical garden.
In general, the upper portions produce strips of a much lighter color, but the strips become very thin due to the narrowing of the stalk near the top. At the lower portion of the stalk, the strips are broad, but the color of the papyrus becomes quite dark when exposed to air. For the purpose of making usable papyrus sheets, it’s really the portion of the stalk in the middle–where the breadth is decent and the color is still light–that is the best part.
This observation potentially sheds some light on a passage in Pliny’s famous description of the manufacture of papyrus (Natural History, book 13). Pliny writes the following (according to the text and translation in Lewis, Papyrus in Classical Antiquity):
Praeparatur ex eo charta diviso acu in praetenues sed quam latissimas philyras; principatus medio, atque inde scissurae ordine.
Paper is made from the papyrus plant by separating it with a needle point into very thin strips as broad as possible. The choice quality comes from the centre, and thence in the order of slicing.
As Lewis notes, there are several puzzles in this short passage, but for now I’m interested in the phrase principatus medio. Lewis understands medio as the center, or core portion, of the pith. But if my observations about the color differences of the pith up and down the stalk are right, then it seems like medium could equally refer to the middle part of the length of the stalk, between top and the root, where the strips are lighter color but still relatively wide. And in fact, already in 1976, Adam Bülow-Jacobsen argued for this interpretation of medio on other grounds:
“I am convinced that medium must be taken quite plainly to mean the part of the plant which is mid-way between the top and the root, and there is good physical reason to understand it thus: All fibers in a papyrus stem run all the way from bottom to top and a cross-section at the top and at the bottom of the same stem will reveal the same number of vascular bundles in both, although the diameter of the stem is much smaller at the top than at the bottom. In terms of strips cut along the fibers this means that a strip from near the bottom of the plant will seem to contain fewer and thicker fibers, which will stand out like wires once the pith between them has been hammered out flat and dried. A strip from near the top of the plant will have great concentration of fibers with little pith between them and will be too narrow for convenience.”1
Bülow-Jacobsen notes that other experimenters came to different conclusions, but the argument from the differences in color in the different levels of the stalk would seem to support his analysis and exegesis of Pliny’s text.
Adam Bülow-Jacobsen, “principatus medio: Pliny, N.H. XIII, 72 sqq.,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 20 (1976) 113-116. ↩︎
Several years ago, I tried to sort out some of the confusion that surrounds the so-called Robinson Papyri, a collection of papyrus manuscripts accumulated by the archaeologist David M. Robinson (1880-1958) and eventually inherited by the classicist William H. Willis (1916-2000). The confusion results from seemingly conflicting descriptions of the collection published by Willis, and the close but unclear relationship between the Robinson Papyri and two other collections, the Mississippi Papyri and the Deaton Papyri. I had first encountered the Robinson Papyri because of my interest in still another intersecting collection, the Bodmer Papyri. Figuring out the Robinson Papyri became more urgent in 2015, when Dirk Obbink claimed that the Robinson Papyri were the source of the now infamous Sappho papyrus that he published (“P.Sapph.Obbink”).
David M. Robinson and William H. Willis
This series of posts (here, here, and here) raised a number of questions. Many of them have now been answered by an informative and thorough new article:
Sharp’s detailed archival research at the University of Mississippi, Duke University, and elsewhere has uncovered some of the reasons for the confusion within these collections. What all these collections have in common is the figure of Willis, who had physical custody of the Robinson Papyri (which he owned through inheritance), the Mississippi Papyri, the Deaton Papyri, and a few scraps of Bodmer Papyri. Sharp demonstrates quite clearly that Willis allowed these groups to intermingle in different ways. This matters because Willis owned the Robinson Papyri but not the other collections. It is thus surprising to learn that some of the Mississippi Papyri and Deaton Papyri became Robinson Papyri and were donated to Duke as the personal property of Willis. As Sharp notes in the case of P.Deaton 28, which was donated to Duke by John Deaton:
“It is impossible to know with certainty why Willis decided to claim personal ownership of P.Deaton 28 rather than donate it to Duke in Deaton’s name. What can be documented is that Willis had P.Deaton 28 appraised for $12,000 as part of his donation to Duke and that he claimed those donations as tax write-offs.”
Willis’s numerous and important contributions to classical studies and papyrology are well known. Sharp’s research adds a new dimension to Willis’s academic legacy and sheds light on the entanglement of papyrologists and the antiquities trade in the twentieth century.
The editors of P.Oxy. 87.5575, the recently published papyrus fragment with a collection of sayings of Jesus, stated that P.Oxy. 60.4009, another papyrus with material about Jesus, “may well be in the same hand, though the loops in that papyrus are sometimes more pronounced and there is perhaps less lifting of the pen.” In preparation for a meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature yesterday, I spent some time with images of the two papyri and managed to convince myself that these pieces were in fact copied by the same person.
I’m often critical of efforts to assign precise dates on the basis of handwriting to undated manuscripts of Greek, Latin, and Coptic writing of the Roman era. The comparisons involved in that process depend on a number of assumptions that I’ve discussed elsewhere on multiple occasions. The comparisons made in palaeographic dating are always a matter of more similar and less similar, and there is always room for debate. When the question has to do with identifying the work of a particular copyist, however, the task is sometimes easier. I say “sometimes” because when it comes to expert execution of highly formal scripts, it really can be difficult to tell the work of one copyist from another (think of the debates around the number of copyists involved in the production of Codex Vaticanus). But when the scripts involved are less formal and the degree of execution more, we might say, relaxed, the process of identifying the work of a single copyist in multiple manuscripts can be more straightforward. It’s a matter of saying, “Look at this combination of idiosyncrasies. These two samples of handwriting were produced by the same person.”
So, here’s a side-by-side comparison of what I would consider a set of idiosyncrasies sufficient to identify the work of a single copyist in P.Oxy. 87.5575 and P.Oxy. 60.4009:
The mu is formed with no lifting of the stylus and with the belly sitting on the lower notional line. The crossbar of the epsilon extends to the top of the first vertical stroke in the nu. The formation of the ξ in both pieces is virtually identical, made without lifting the stylus. The upper right quadrant of the omicron in both pieces is occasionally flattened. The epsilon-iota combination is regularly produced with the iota simply trailing off the middle bar of the epsilon and extending below the lower notional line. The oblique strokes of the kappa in και extend out in an almost horizontal fashion and bend down slightly toward the lower loop of the alpha.
Each of these individual features could be paralleled pretty easily in other papyri, but the combination of all of them in both pieces and the level of graphic similarity on display here make me comfortable saying these two fragments were the work of the same copyist. There are occasionally some slight differences in the formation of some letters, but these all fall within what I would call a normal level of variation for any copyist.
There is at least one other example among the Christian material at Oxyrhynchus in which we find the same copyist responsible for two manuscripts. AnneMarie Luijendijk pointed out to me several years ago that P.Oxy. 8.1078 (Hebrews) and P.Oxy. 6.850 (Acts of John) were likely written by the same person. Arthur Hunt had actually made the identification in his edition of P.Oxy. 8.1078, but I had not noted the reference. It is also worth recalling the recently published set of Septuagint papyri, P.Oxy. 84.5404-5408, which seem to have been copied by the same person but apparently were part of different codices.
I would be even more interested to see if it is possible to identify the work of a single copyist who was responsible for both Christian and non-Christian papyri.
Earlier this year, I noted the news that we may have a new candidate for the earliest surviving portion of a codex, P.Hib. 113, a papyrus excavated from the Egyptian town of Hibeh and now kept at the University of Graz. Theresa Zammit Lupi and the team at Graz have now produced a much more detailed study of the papyrus, which is freely available here.
I have not yet had the opportunity to read the paper carefully and think it through, but a quick scan shows that it is well illustrated and promises to make further study of this artifact much more informed. I look forward to the ongoing discussion.
The publication of the latest volume of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri has been in the news. Among the newly published pieces is a small fragment of a leaf of a papyrus codex that contains a previously unknown collection of sayings of Jesus. Candida Moss has a nice summary and analysis in her recent column. I have now read the edition of the papyrus, and I offer a few first impressions. I see that I first encountered this papyrus (part of it, anyway) several years ago when it emerged from Jerry Pattengale’s pocket during a lecture in 2011.
Jerry Pattengale with a stolen Oxyrhynchus papyrus during a lecture in the “Passages” series in 2011
On that occasion, Pattengale described the papyrus as a copy of “the end of Matthew 6” that had been “dated to about 140 to 160.” Pattengale continued, elaborating on how the date was established: “It’s early. And you have in the room a couple people, um, that can do that. And then Dr. Obbink as well.” The reference is to Professor Dirk Obbink, who allegedly stole this and many other papyri from the Oxyrhynchus collection and sold them to the Green Collection and other buyers. So, these stolen papyri that were returned to the Egypt Exploration Society are now being published.
In his lecture, Pattengale stressed the quite early dating of the papyrus in order to emphasize the “reliability” of the New Testament documents:
“My friends, this is 200 years earlier than a lot of the texts that are much in the sensational news today. This is part of that list that supports the canon.”
Not exactly. Now that the papyrus has been more thoroughly studied, it turns out that it is not a copy of the Gospel according to Matthew, but rather a previously unknown collection of sayings of Jesus that has some similarities with material found in Matthew and Luke and the Gospel of Thomas. In other words, it’s a non-canonical text about Jesus, which, if the dating is correct (and that’s a significant “if”), is earlier than almost all surviving copies of anything in the New Testament. In the new publication, the editors assign the copying of the fragment more broadly to the second century.
So, there is quite a bit of excitement around the fragment. But it is challenging to assign a date to a papyrus like this. We have no criteria to judge the date except for the handwriting on the fragment, which can sometimes not be a very reliable guide, as I have discussed on many occasions. Good images of the papyrus as published are not yet available. Peter Gurry at Evangelical Textual Criticism has posted these images of the ex-Green Collection fragment (the published edition contains another small fragment that was identified in the collection at Oxford):
The ex-Green Collection portion of P.Oxy. 87.5575, horizontal fibers (→); image source: Evangelical Textual Criticism
The script falls into Turner’s rather broad “informal round” classification and is “only approximately bilinear,” meaning that the letters do not always stay between upper and lower notional lines. The editors note that the letters show a slight slope to the left (\) and have “several cursive elements.” They offer four securely dated manuscripts that they regard as having a similar script. All the pieces have dates in the second half of the second century:
CPG II. 1 App. 1
178 CE
P.CtYBR inv. 685
157-160 CE or 180-188 CE
P.Oxy. 36.2761
161-169 CE
C. Pap. Gr. II.1 63
185 CE
The editors also note the very close similarity of script with another collection of the sayings of Jesus, P.Oxy. 60.4009, even suggesting the possibility that the same copyist was responsible for both manuscripts, stating that the two “may well be in the same hand.”
The scripts are quite similar. It is interesting, then, that the editors of P.Oxy. 60.4009 offered a different set of dated samples to justify their dating of 4009. These samples cluster in the first half of the second century rather than the second half:
Schubart, Pal. Abb. 81
81 CE
Norsa, Scritt. Doc. XVc
133-136 CE
Schubart, PGB 22b
135 CE (?)
Schubart, PGB 24
148 CE
If we agree to the basic assumption of palaeographic dating (similar visual appearance of scripts = similar dates of production), then the evaluation of these claims means having a close look at the suggested comparative evidence and seeing how similar the samples actually are. To facilitate that process, I gather here links to the images of the relevant dated manuscripts that have featured in the discussion so far.
CPG II. 1 App. 1, a report of an accidental death copied in 178 CE:
I tend to agree with the editors about the similarity of the scripts of 5575 and 4009, but in my first look at the proposals for dated parallels (for both the pieces), I cannot say that I find any of them especially compelling. This is not to criticize the work of the editors. It is very difficult to find good, securely dated comparanda for scripts like these. A more detailed evaluation will have to wait for another occasion.
Before finishing this post, I should also point out that the editors of P.Oxy. 87.5575 state that “P. Orsini, cited by Trismegistos, has placed 4009 in the first half of the fourth century, but we have not found evidence to support such a dating for either of these papyri.” The reference is to the noted palaeographer Pasquale Orsini, whose assessment appears on the Leuven Database of Ancient Books. When this fourth century date was published on the Database several years ago, I asked Professor Orisini about the evidence for this new assessment, and he provided a list of several other undated literary papyri. So a full and convincing argument in favor a fourth century date has yet to be made.
John de Monins Johnson (1882-1956) was in some ways a kind of successor to Grenfell and Hunt for a short period in the early twentieth century. Before taking up a position at Oxford University Press, he had training as a papyrologist under Hunt’s supervision. After Grenfell and Hunt stopped excavating for papyri in Egypt, Johnson led expeditions to Greek and Roman sites for the Egypt Exploration Fund for a number of years. In the winter of 1913-1914, he led excavations in Egypt at Antinoopolis, and his reports from the dig make for interesting reading. He was more meticulous about record keeping than Grenfell and Hunt, and he also made some interesting digressions in his reports. My attention was drawn especially to his account of the discovery of large amounts of blank papyrus in the rubbish mounds of Antinoopolis: “[Mound] N was remarkable throughout for what is often a feature of late mounds, the quantity of blank papyrus it provided. In this case sacks might have been filled.”
I was surprised to read Johnson’s description of what they did with all this blank papyrus and why they did it:
“This blank papyrus is carefully torn into small fragments before being given to the winds so that material shall not be added to the store of the papyrus forger. At the risk of a further digression a note may perhaps here be inserted on the methods of the latter. Most papyrologists are familiar with his work, fewer know the forger himself. Hufuta, an uneducated fellah of the Fayum, formerly of Hawara but now living and plying his trade in the Medina, is an amusing and not wholly unattractive character. In stature and appearance he resembles somewhat his notorious countertype, Islam Akhun, the forger of central Asian books, and his work, like Islam Akhun’s, has won the distinction of being published with facsimile in a serious book. His methods are roughly threefold. Blank sheets of papyrus from the mounds, cut into uniform pages and inscribed in red or black ink with a sequence of meaningless signs resembling somewhat pothooks and hangers, are sewn together and bound in thicker sheets of papyrus which are covered with mummy-cloth. The second method is similar but relies on skin in imitation of vellum as its medium, this being bound in skin with strips of mummy cloth or even with an elaborate arrangement of copper corners linked with wire and beads. By his third method, perhaps a more deceptive one, numerous tiny fragments of genuine inscribed papyrus, too small to find a sale, are glued together till they form a sheet, a strange literary mosaic in which the lines are incontinuous and Ptolemaic rubs shoulders with Byzantine, and this is then tightly rolled. The smell of the oil in which his productions are soaked before being buried is often a sufficient test for those who do not happen to be scholars.”
Items like Hufuta’s third type of forgery are pretty common in museums with Egyptological collections. Here is an example from the National Museum of Archaeology in Dublin:
A fake papyrus roll assembled from ancient materials, on display at the National Museum of Archaeology in Dublin; image source: Brent Nongbri 2022
The papyrus fragments in such rolls can be genuinely ancient, but they also sometimes contain ancient papyrus with modern writing. And the “rolls” themselves are modern productions. The World Museum in Liverpool offers another example:
A similar-looking roll was the vehicle for the published fake that Johnson mentions in the quotation above, P.Stras. 1 39. Apologies for the quality of the scan of the edition:
One of the pieces removed from the roll, P.Stras. 1 39A, is a nice example of the gibberish symbols that characterize fake papyri that have ended up in a number of collections over the years:
For a working list of known fake papyri from Egypt, see the helpful spreadsheet of Macquarie University’s “Forging Antiquity” project: http://www.forgingantiquity.com/forgeries.
Sources:
John de Monins Johnson, “Antinoë and its Papyri: Excavation by the Graeco-Roman Branch, 1913-14,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 1914, 168-181.
Friedrich Preisigke, Griechische Papyrus der Kaiserlichen Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek zu Strassburg (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1912).
In literature about the process of papyrus production in antiquity, the word χαρτοποιός (“papyrus maker” or “papyrus roll manufacturer”) comes up with some frequency. What’s odd is that its role in the discussion is out of proportion to its attestation. The term appears in only two search results on papyri.info, and both have some problems. The first instance is P.Tebt. 1 5, a list of edicts of Euergetes II from the year 118 BCE. The relevant section is a list of different types of workers who are exempt from a requirement–textile workers (wool weavers and others), pig herders, goose keepers, makers of oil, beekeepers, and brewers. The relevant lines are here in the form they appear on papyri.info:
The asterisk indicates that the reading given in this line on papyri.info differs from what the original editors (Grenfell and Hunt) proposed, which was this:
In support of the restoration of [χαρτοποιού]ς, the Berichtigungsliste gives references that lead ultimately to a single Russian work that I have been unable to track down. The reference is given in the following forms:
W. G. Borukhovich, Papirusnye svidetelstva ob organizacii proizvodstva i prodaje charty ν Egiptie vremeni Ptolemeev. Problemy socialno-ekonomicheskoy istorii Drevnego mira. Sbornik pamyati akademika A. I. Tiumeneva = Papyrus-testimonies concerning the organization of the production and sale of charta in Egypt in the times of the Ptolemies. The problems of the social and economic history of the Ancient World. A collection of essays in memory of the academician A. I. Tiumenev. Moscow-Leningrad, 1963, pp. 271-287.
D.G. Boruknovič, Papyrologische Quellen zur Organisation der Herstellung und des Handels mit Papyrus im ptolem. Ägypten, Gedächtnisschrift für A.J. Tjumenev, 1963, S. 271 ff.
(If anyone who has access to the chapter and reads Russian wants to offer a translation of the relevant bits, that would be great!)
In any event, a quick look at an image of the papyrus suggests that Grenfell and Hunt’s more conservative transcription is probably safer, as there really is just a light trace of (maybe) a final sigma and nothing else. The dotted line is where our missing word would be:
P.Tebt. 1 5, with dotted line showing the space where [χαρτοποιού]ς is suggested to fill the lacuna; image adapted from Berkeley Library Digital Collections
The second occurrence is in another papyrus from Tebtunis, P.Tebt. 1 112 (=P.Tebt. 5 1151), an account of income and expenses. We have a little more to work with here in the relevant lines:
We clearly do have a χαρτ- word here, and the context, in which expenditures for other writing materials is discussed, lends itself to a word meaning “seller of papyrus,” but not so much “maker of papyrus.” And I hate to disagree with Grenfell and Hunt, but I cannot convince myself there is a pi and an omicron in where they see it after the lacuna in χαρτ[ο]πο(ιῶι) Γω:
P.Tebt. 1 112, showing the hole and ink traces where Grenfell and Hunt read χαρτ[ο]πο(ιῶι); image adapted from Berkeley Library Digital Collections
I don’t know of any other proposed restorations here. Ulrich Wilcken (Grundzüge, 1.1.255) resolved the abbreviation differently, proposing χαρτοπό(ληι) = χαρτοπώ(ληι), “papyrus seller,” but this word is just as poorly attested (and doesn’t solve the pi–omicron problem). Another thing that bothers me here is the meaning of διαγεγρ(αμμένων) (I’m not sure why papyri.info has διαγεγρ(αμμαμένων) with an extra syllable here). In his re-edition of the papyrus, Verhoogt translates as follows:
“To Harphaesis, armed guard, ditto, as the price of rolls of papyrus for payment in full of the 3,800 paid to the papyrus-maker,
Verhoogt presumably takes διαγεγρ(αμμένων) as a synonym of διαγρ(αφή) (in this context meaning “payment”), which occurs a few lines later in reference to papyrus rolls. But is that the best way to handle this? As Verhoogt notes, the other papyrus rolls mentioned in this account are specified as ἄγρ(αφος), “blank,” “unused,” or “uninscribed.῾ It stands to reason that in such a context, διαγεγρ(αμμένων) would mean the opposite: “used” or “inscribed” (although I don’t know of any parallel usages of this word in this way). If this is the correct understanding, it would raise the question of whether we should imagine buying used papyrus rolls from a “papyrus maker” or a “papyrus seller.”
In any event, I don’t spend a lot of time reading Ptolemaic documents, so I don’t really have any insight into how that gap might be filled in an intelligible way, but given its lack of existence elsewhere in the papyrological record (so far), and the surviving ink traces here, I’m a little skeptical of χαρτοποιῶι.
In an article in ZPE from 2016, Menico Caroli added two more potential candidates for possible occurrences of χαρτοποιός, P.Wisc. 1 29 and P.Flor. 3 388. P.Wisc. 1 29 is a highly fragmentary list written on the back of another document. The relevant line is quite damaged, and the quality of the published image is not great. The transcription from papyri.info is below, along with the relevant section of the image.
κ̣δ Ἀλλοῦτι χαρ̣τ̣[ο]\π̣/[(ώλῃ)] (ἀρτάβη) α
P.Wisc. 1 29, detail of letters editor restores as χαρ̣τ̣[ο]\π̣/[(ώλῃ)] image source: P.J. Sijpesteijn, The Wisconsin Papyri I (Brill, 1967), plate X
The original editor suggested χαρτοπράτῃ as a possible alternative reading for χαρτοπώλῃ. The word χαρτοπράτης (“papyrus seller”) has the virtue of being clearly attested in unabbreviated form in two papyri, but the drawback is that both these papyri date to the seventh century CE at earliest (BGU 1 319 and P.Berol. inv. 2749). The term also appears in Latin transliteration (chartopratis) in the Justinian Code 11.18. Caroli, however, suggests that we have here another instance of χαρτοποιός, but given what we have seen of the overall insecure attestation of this word, proposing such a reading here just begs the question.
P.Flor. 3 388 is a set of private daily accounts from the late first or early second century CE. The online image of this piece is not especially good, but I supply it below with the text of the relevant lines from papyri.info:
P.Flor. 3 388, showing the letters read as χαρτοπ in the second line; image adapted from PSI Online
The editor left the abbreviation unresolved. Caroli suggests χαρτοποιός. But again, there is no clear reason to resolve the abbreviation in one way or the other.
The TLG doesn’t help much either, giving just one hit, Constantine Porphyrogenitus (905-959 CE), De administrando imperio 52.11, in which χαρτοποιοί are listed among other professions (sailors and murex fishers) that did not provide horses in a levy in the Peloponnese in the tenth century. There is no indication of the exact meaning of the word. “Papyrus maker” seems unlikely in such a temporal and geographic setting, but if the term refers to another writing surface (parchment or paper), surely it must have had a prehistory of some sort in which papyrus figured?
The Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität, if I understand the entry correctly, adds a reference to a particular manuscript of Theodore of Stoudios (8th-9th century): “A. Dobroklonskij, Prepodobnyj Feodor I (Odessa 1913) 413adn.1.: Theod. Stud., catech. magn. in cod. Patm. 112.” I have not had a chance to track this reference.
So, there are still some references to check, but at this point, I don’t think I’m totally convinced that we have any attestations of this word before the medieval period.
I’ve been experimenting with making my own papyrus and discovering that there are lots of variables to control in order to make good quality writing material. One thing that especially surprised me has to do with the color of papyrus.
Modern commercially available papyrus produced in Egypt is often treated with an alkaline solution and bleach during production, which gives it a yellowish color (as outlined in this video, at the 1:40 mark). Commercially available papyrus produced in Sicily, at least the samples I have seen, tends to have a more brown tint. I’m not sure if the Italians use any additional processing. In any event, the papyrus sheets that one can buy aren’t entirely helpful when thinking about the color of papyrus in antiquity.
In making my own papyrus, I expected that different plants would yield sheets that looked a little different, but I was surprised to find that two stalks from the same plant could produce sheets of quite different colors. The image below shows two small sheets that I made using two stalks from the same plant.
Papyrus sheets of different color produced from the same plant; image source: Brent Nongbri, July 2023
The two stalks were cut at the same time. The pith of each of the stalks was an identical color (white with a slight grey tinge). I cut the strips in the same way from the same central portion of each stalk. I pressed them under the same conditions. Yet the colors are very different.
I’ve wondered about passages in ancient Roman authors that describe papyrus sheets as white. When Pliny discusses different grades of papyrus, he lists several qualities by which papyrus sheets were judged: fineness, firmness, smoothness, and whiteness (candor). At least one Roman poet describes papyrus rolls as “snowy white” (Tibullus [Lygdamus], Elegiae 3.1.9: lutea sed niveum involvat membrana libellum: “But let yellow parchment wrap the snowy white little book”). It makes me wonder if there was something different about the papyrus plants that grew in Egypt in antiquity, or if there was something in the ancient processing that helped to produce uniformly white sheets (for instance, Pliny mentions that papyrus sheets were dried in the sun–could that have a bleaching effect?). It would be challenging to produce papyrus sheets on an industrial scale if you had to worry about strips from different stalks potentially having quite different colors and ending up on the same sheet. That kind of thing did happen occasionally. Notice the differently colored papyrus strips in this bifolium from the Bodmer Menander Codex:
Bifolium from the Bodmer Menander Codex, showing alternate strips of lighter papyrus; image adapted from the Bodmer Lab
You see this phenomenon from time to time (thought not usually so pronounced). For the most part, however, it seems like ancient bookmakers tried to avoid this kind of thing.
Variant Readings 
