Business Letters from Byzantine Egypt

Since the end of the nineteenth century thousands of ancient Greek texts written on papyri, parchments, ostraca and wooden tablets have been discovered, mostly in Middle and Upper Egypt, as well as the Near East. A significant percentage of these texts fall into the category of letters. This is not surprising, given that letter writing was the only possible method of personal communication in ancient societies. At the same time, letters were used by the authorities to administer their extensive territories in the land of Nile. Private and business letters, i.e. letters written by and addressed to private people and referring to all aspects of private life, are by far the most interesting category of non-literary papyri. These authentic texts, preserved on the original writing materials, were written to fulfill the everyday practical needs of their senders, who were ordinary people and did not make any literary claims. These ancient writers used Greek Vernacular, a colloquial language, in order to express their plans, thoughts and emotions. A significant part of these valuable written sources have already been transcribed and commented upon, and are thus accessible to all those interested in their study. However, a great number of them remain unpublished. What is more, even the published papyri need to be analysed further. The proposed research project strives to enlarge the corpus of written sources and to increase our understanding of the texts. Firstly this project aspires to offer an edition of twenty five hitherto unpublished papyrus letters, which are housed at the Collection of Papyri (Papyrussammlung) of the Austrian National Library. The letters in question mostly refer to professional and financial activities of everyday life. They come from various sites of ancient Egypt and are dated to a period extending from the fourth to the seventh century AD. This period was marked by the end of the Eastern Roman / Byzantine rule in Egypt, the Arab conquests of the seventh century, and the transition to a new era under Arab domination. Secondly, the focus will be on the language and linguistic strategies used by ancient writers in their attempts to be convincing and polite. This analysis aims to bring to the fore all the epistolary conventions and typical features of Byzantine non-literary letters, allowing, in this way, their comparison to the literary correspondence of the same period. In sum, the proposed project aspires to shed more light on the fascinating world of ancient Greek epistolography and to broaden our horizons considering the language and culture of Greaco-Roman Egypt and of the late antique worlds in general.

The goal of the project entitled Business Letters from Byzantine Egypt was the reading and reconstruction of a rather coherent (in terms of dating and/or genre) corpus of authentic, non-literary texts preserved on ancient writing material, namely papyri and parchments. These ancient written sources are housed at the Collection of Papyri of the Austrian National Library (Papyrussammlung, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek). This Collection is one of the largest Collections of papyri, since it houses ca. 180,000 ancient and early medieval papyri, ostraca and tablets, of which 60,000 pieces are Greek papyri. Just one tenth of this major collection, that is around 6,500 pieces, have been published so far. The selected corpus contained non-literary, texts, mostly letters, i.e. texts connected to everyday life. The outcomes of this scientific were included in a monograph, where others were published as scientific articles and chapters in collective volumes. The edition of the selected texts consists of the following parts: An introduction to each one of these pieces, which contains a thorough description of the features of the handwriting and the writing material; the dating of the selected pieces on the basis of a careful examination of their palaeographical features; the specification of the provenance of the texts; the specification of the text type; a brief apodosis of the content of each one of the selected texts; prosopographical information. Precise transcriptions of the selected texts, followed by an apparatus criticus and an English translation. Line-to-line commentary for each one of the texts that focuses on their more demanding parts (such as for instance, the rarely attested vocabulary). Apart from the edition and annotation of the selected texts, the volume includes an analysis of the linguistic features of the private correspondence on papyrus (among others, recurrent constructions and formulae, politeness strategies, intertextual references) with references to literary texts of late antique and Byzantine era (including patristic literature). The volume offers references to all papyrological and inscriptive parallels, as well as documents of juristic nature that are linked to the republished corpus. Finally, it includes plenty of references to all secondary bibliography, namely the major lexica, grammars and studies for the ancient Greek language in general, and on post-classical Greek in particular, as well as historical studies. The decipherment of these texts and their placement in their philological and historical context will provide papyrologists, historians and philologist with valuable information for the Late Antiquity and early Medieval times.