In a small room in Oslo lie hundreds of pieces of 2,000-year-old papyrus
Researchers are working on publishing two new volumes from the papyrus collection in Oslo.
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On the fourth floor of the HumSam Library at the University of Oslo, a small room holds hundreds of ancient Egyptian texts.
These texts, written in ink some 2,000 years ago, are preserved on fragments of papyrus. The pieces are mounted behind glass, lined up neatly in display cases.
The curator of the collection, Federico Aurora, brings out one of them, perhaps his favourite: A piece of a scroll containing Plato's The Statesman, copied sometime in the 2nd century CE.
Another fragment, dating from the 3rd or 4th century, comes from the fourth book of Homer's Odyssey.
Out of approximately 2,200 texts in the collection, only about 300 have been fully interpreted and published. Most were released in the 1920s and 1930s across three volumes, with additional material published in various journals in the following years.
"There's still quite a bit left to publish," notes Aurora.
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Now, after 90 years, papyrologist Anastasia Maravela is preparing two new volumes with approximately 80 papyri.
Letters, horoscopes, and contracts
The texts at the library are from the period after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt.
"We have papyri ranging from the last centuries before Christ to the 6th-7th centuries after Christ," says Aurora.
Greek continued to be used by the elites after Egypt became a Roman province in 30 BCE.
The most striking texts – fragments of poetry, literature, and magical papyri – have already been published.
However, the majority of the collection consists of documentary papyri: private letters, wills, horoscopes, tax documents, contracts, sales of assets such as houses, slaves, or animals, registration of land holdings, agreements related to loans, rental contracts, and so on.
Insight into daily life
There's not much of a wow factor in finding a letter about someone in Egypt selling their house, says Aurora.
"But these are important documents that give us insight into daily life in Egypt over several centuries," he says.
One letter, called P.Oslo II 47, shows this clearly. In it, a man named Dionysios writes to his friend Theon about buying fish and beans. He warns him about a potentially dishonest supplier: 'See to it that he does not cheat you, as he usually cheats in business affairs.'
Each fragment matters
The contents of the upcoming volumes are diverse, reflecting the overall collection, explains Anastasia Maravela, professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Oslo.
"We're publishing a few remaining literary fragments, including copies of Homer's Iliad and the ninth book of Herodotus from the 2nd and 3rd centuries, along with fragments that shed light on daily life in Egypt during the Hellenistic, Roman, and early Byzantine periods," she says.
Most of the texts are not extraordinary on their own, Maravela notes.
"Still, they're of great interest to philologists and historians because they're connected with texts in other papyrus collections that document various historical and societal conditions," she says.
Some fragments can also verify the wording of literary texts hundreds of years after their creation – yet still long before the earliest surviving medeival manuscripts of the same work.
Interpreting ancient Greek words
In the small library room in Oslo, there are bookshelves filled with published papyri from around the world. Tens of thousands of papyrus sheets from antiquity have survived.
Federico Aurora mentions a discovery in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, where two British researchers unearthed around 50,000 papyrus texts from an ancient rubbish heap between 1896 and 1907. The texts are now stored at the University of Oxford. Many of them have still not been interpreted or published.
So, what does it mean when a papyrus is published?
Aurora retrieves a fragment from The Odyssey. The first step is simply trying to read it. You might realise it's poetry.
"An experienced reader can spot the word atrekeōs, which means 'without doubt' or 'certainly' – a typical adverb in Homer's style," says Aurora, pointing.
You can search for the text in databases of ancient literary works or on Papyri.info, a shared database for all published papyri. If the fragment is a letter or a document, you won’t find the exact same text, but you might find similar phrasing.
To publish a papyrus means to transcribe the text in a standardised way, describe the size of the fragment, attempt to date it, and provide a commentary on its content.
These are then published in physical books and later made available on Papyri.info.
A letter about Hippocrates, the father of medicine
Maravela has several favourites among the new papyri to be published, but she highlights a small fragment marked as P.Oslo inv. 1612.
It was probably copied sometime between 100 BCE and 100 CE and contains an early version of a decree from the collection known as the Hippocratic Letters.
"They present themselves as authentic documents, mostly letters, that shed light on the life of antiquity's most famous physician, Hippocrates of Kos, who was active in the second half of the 5th century BCE," says Maravela.
"The collection includes a decree in which Athens honours Hippocrates for his efforts to stop the plague that struck the city in 430 BCE and for refusing to serve the king of Persia," she says.
The Hippocratic Letters were passed down through medieval manuscripts, the oldest dating back to the 9th century CE.
"The fragment from the Oslo collection is about 700 years older and uses simpler language," says Maravela. "It adds weight to the theory that the Hippocratic Letters weren’t written by Hippocrates himself, but were created later – likely in Hellenistic Alexandria – to bring a legendary figure to life and connect him more closely with the medical texts attributed to him."
A spellbook from Egypt
One particularly interesting item in the collection is a well-preserved, 2.5-metre-long magical papyrus from the 4th century CE.
It's essentially an ancient spellbook. The curious figures on the scroll look as if they could have been drawn yesterday.
This was the first papyrus from the collection to be published, and it was given the designation P.Oslo.I 1, which stands for 'papyrus, Oslo, volume I, number 1.'
The book contains recipes or formulas for magic spells, somewhat like the Norwegian black books.
You were supposed to write down names and formulas, draw the figure as shown, and follow the instructions exactly.
One spell describes how to make a man or woman fall in love with you. Another explains how to bind someone.
Included in the Bible
One of the papyri in the collection is made in the form of a small book, rather than a scroll.
"I call it the most famous papyrus in southern Norway," says Aurora.
It contains a small portion of the Gospel of Matthew and the Book of Daniel, written in Greek and Coptic – the final stage of the ancient Egyptian language.
This papyrus is included in the critical edition of the Bible. A critical edition is a scholarly version of a work that compares multiple versions of the same text preserved in different manuscripts, in an attempt to reconstruct a version as close to the original as possible, explains Aurora.
This tiny papyrus has even played a role in deciding whether a line should read 'Jesus said' or 'said Jesus.'
Preserved by the dry climate
Why do so many ancient papyri come from Egypt?
Most surviving papyri today originate from Egypt, Aurora explains. A few come from the Middle East.
"That's because they were preserved by the dry climate," he says.
They are often found in old, dry rubbish heaps, says the researcher.
There were once papyri in places like Italy, but they did not survive the humid weather and gradually rotted away. A few charred scrolls from Italy, buried during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, have been recovered.
The University of Oslo’s papyrus collection began with Professor Samson Eitrem, who travelled to Egypt in 1910 and bought a few specimens with his own money.
"Eventually, he secured funding from various foundations to acquire more papyri," says Aurora.
Music and the Book of the Dead
Aurora also shows a Greek piece of music with a form of notation from the 2nd century CE.
It offers a glimpse into what kind of music people listened to in Roman times.
"This is quite rare," says Aurora. "The papyrus contains two fragments with musical notation, possibly from one or two lost tragedies. The content is difficult to interpret, but a ghost and Achilles are mentioned."
The collection also features texts written in ancient Egyptian script. Aurora opens another drawer.
"This is the only hieroglyphic papyrus we have: the Book of the Dead," he says.
A Book of the Dead was a collection of texts placed in the graves of Egyptian elites.
Another version in the collection is written in hieratic, a simplified form of hieroglyphs. This one even includes a coloured illustration.
Straight from antiquity
Most of what we know about Greek antiquity comes from copies made during the Middle Ages.
Old papyri with texts by Homer or Plato are not necessarily better than the medieval versions, says Aurora. They’re still typically younger than the original works.
But papyrus scrolls can also reveal unknown works and authors that have not survived through medieval manuscripts.
"When papyri started being discovered in Egypt in the 1800s, it was the first time we gained access to authentic texts from antiquity – aside from inscriptions," says Federico Aurora.
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Translated by Alette Bjordal Gjellesvik
Read the Norwegian version of this article on forskning.no
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