New Papyri from Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine Egypt

START project Y 69 New Papyri from Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine Egypt Bernhard PALME 20.06.1997 In antiquity papyrus was used as a writing material for literary texts and all kind of documents from everyday life. The Austrian National Library houses one of the world`s richest collections of papyri, with more than 180,000 items. The proposed project will concentrate on Greek documentary texts of this collection, dating from the Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine periods (3rd-7th century A.D.), and will represent, in international terms, one of the most substantial and ambitious plans for the publication of new documents from the ancient world. The aims of the project are 1) an edition of about 500 unpublished documentary papyri, including legal contracts, official and private papers, receipts and accounts; 2) a critically revised edition of another 1350 papyri published at the beginning of this century in SPP III and VIII. These are mainly short texts, and of importance particularly for economic history; but the addition of a full photographic record will constitute a most valuable contribution to Byzantine palaeography. The central concern of the proposed work is the editing of unpublished papyri. Besides the applicant (B. Palme), it is proposed to employ three excellent young scholars with expertise in the field papyrology (F. Mitthof, F. Morelli, A. Papathomas). They willdecipher the texts and prepare the editions which will consist of introduction, Greek text, translation, apparatus criticus and commentary. During the six years` term of the project each collaborator will contribute two volumes. Each volume will be complete in itself, containing about 60 texts, indices of Greek words, and a full set of photographs. A fifth collaborator, probably a doctoral student (not yet nominated), will work on the revised edition of SPP III and VIII, making a systematic check of the original papyri, and taking into account all hitherto published corrections. The revised edition will also contain full indices and a photograph of every papyrus. By-products of the work on the editions will be published in papyrological journals. Influence of the proposed work on the development of the field The Vienna collection of papyri contains more than 60,000 texts in the Greek language. After more than a century of continuous editorial activity, about 12,000 Greek papyri have been published. In addition to its purely scholarly results, the project will represent important progress in the systematic publication of the treasures of the Vienna collection and a stimulus for other national and international editorial programmes connected with this collection. Such a long-term and large project will function as a vital impetus to papyrological studies in Austria. Moreover, the presentation of some 500 new papyri, and the revision of another 1350 texts, will have a significant influence on papyrological scholarship in general, and on all disciplines making use of the results of papyrological research. Papyri are our most important supply of new sources for the history of the ancient world. By offering a substantial number of new texts, the proposed project would make a major contribution to a more detailed and precise understanding of the history of Graeco-Roman Egypt and - in a broader sense - of the eastern Mediterranean, in the period A.D. 300 and 650.