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Papyrology is the study of ancient literature, correspondence, legal archives, etc., as preserved in manuscript
Manuscript

A manuscript is any document that is written by hand, as opposed to being printed or reproduced in some other way. The term may also be used for information that is hand-recorded in other ways than writing, for example inscriptions that are chiselled upon a hard material or scratched as with a knife point in plaster or with a stylus on a wa...
s written on papyrus
Papyrus

Papyrus is a thick paper material produced from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland Cyperaceae that was once abundant in the Nile Delta of Egypt....
, the most common form of writing material in the Egypt
Egypt

Egypt is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Western Asia. Covering an area of about , Egypt borders the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Gaza Strip and Israel to the northeast, the Red Sea to the east, Sudan to the south and Libya to the west....
ian, Greek
Greece

Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , is a country in southeastern Europe, situated on the southern end of the Balkans. It has borders with Albania, Bulgaria and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to the north, and Turkey to the east....
 and Roman
Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC....
 worlds. Papyrology entails both the translation and interpretation of ancient documents in a variety of languages, as well as the care and preservation of the papyrus originals.

Papyrology as a systematic discipline dates from the 1890s, when large caches of well-preserved papyri were discovered by archaeologists in several locations in Egypt
Egypt

Egypt is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Western Asia. Covering an area of about , Egypt borders the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Gaza Strip and Israel to the northeast, the Red Sea to the east, Sudan to the south and Libya to the west....
, such as Crocodilopolis
Crocodilopolis

Crocodilopolis or Krokodilopolis or Ptolemais Euergetis or Arsinoe was an ancient city in the Heptanomis, Egypt, the capital of Arsinoites nome, on the western bank of the Nile, between the river and the Lake Moeris, southwest of Memphis, Egypt, in lat....
 (Arsinoe) and Oxyrhynchus
Oxyrhynchus

Oxyrhynchus is a city in Upper Egypt, located about 160 km south-southwest of Cairo, in the governorate of Al Minya Governorate. It is also an archaeological site, considered one of the most important ever discovered....
.






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Papyrology is the study of ancient literature, correspondence, legal archives, etc., as preserved in manuscript
Manuscript

A manuscript is any document that is written by hand, as opposed to being printed or reproduced in some other way. The term may also be used for information that is hand-recorded in other ways than writing, for example inscriptions that are chiselled upon a hard material or scratched as with a knife point in plaster or with a stylus on a wa...
s written on papyrus
Papyrus

Papyrus is a thick paper material produced from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland Cyperaceae that was once abundant in the Nile Delta of Egypt....
, the most common form of writing material in the Egypt
Egypt

Egypt is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Western Asia. Covering an area of about , Egypt borders the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Gaza Strip and Israel to the northeast, the Red Sea to the east, Sudan to the south and Libya to the west....
ian, Greek
Greece

Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , is a country in southeastern Europe, situated on the southern end of the Balkans. It has borders with Albania, Bulgaria and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to the north, and Turkey to the east....
 and Roman
Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC....
 worlds. Papyrology entails both the translation and interpretation of ancient documents in a variety of languages, as well as the care and preservation of the papyrus originals.

Papyrology as a systematic discipline dates from the 1890s, when large caches of well-preserved papyri were discovered by archaeologists in several locations in Egypt
Egypt

Egypt is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Western Asia. Covering an area of about , Egypt borders the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Gaza Strip and Israel to the northeast, the Red Sea to the east, Sudan to the south and Libya to the west....
, such as Crocodilopolis
Crocodilopolis

Crocodilopolis or Krokodilopolis or Ptolemais Euergetis or Arsinoe was an ancient city in the Heptanomis, Egypt, the capital of Arsinoites nome, on the western bank of the Nile, between the river and the Lake Moeris, southwest of Memphis, Egypt, in lat....
 (Arsinoe) and Oxyrhynchus
Oxyrhynchus

Oxyrhynchus is a city in Upper Egypt, located about 160 km south-southwest of Cairo, in the governorate of Al Minya Governorate. It is also an archaeological site, considered one of the most important ever discovered....
. (See Oxyrhynchus Gospels
Oxyrhynchus Gospels

The Oxyrhynchus Gospels are two fragmentary manuscripts , discovered among the rich finds of discarded papyri at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Unknown to most laymen, they throw light on early non-canonical Gospel traditions....
.) Leading centres of papyrology include Oxford University, Heidelberg University, Columbia University
Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York , is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights, Manhattan neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City....
, the University of Michigan
University of Michigan

The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan is a public university research university located in the state of Michigan. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan, which also includes two regional campuses in University of Michigan-Flint and University of Michigan-Dearborn....
, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, and the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley is a public university research university located in Berkeley, California, California, United States. The oldest of the ten major campuses affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley offers some 300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines....
. Founders of papyrology were the Viennese orientalist Joseph von Karabacek (Arabic papyrology),  Wilhelm Schubart (Greek papyrology), the Austrian antiquarian Theodor Graf who acquired more than 100,000 Greek, Arabic, Coptic and Persian papyri in Egypt, which were bought by the Austrian Archduke Rainer
Archduke Rainer Ferdinand of Austria

Archduke Rainer Ferdinand Maria Johann Evangelist Franz Ignaz von ?sterreich was an Austrian prime minister. He was a son of Archduke Rainer Joseph....
,  G. F. Tsereteli
Grigol Tsereteli

Grigol Tsereteli was a distinguished Georgia scientist, one of the founders of Papyrology, founder of the Georgian scientific school of Classics, Doctor of Philological Sciences, Meritorious Scientific Worker of Georgia, Honourable Professor....
 who published papyri of Russian and Georgian collections,  Frederic George Kenyon, Ulrich Wilcken
Ulrich Wilcken

Ulrich Wilcken was a German historian and papyrologist who was a native of Stettin.Wilcken studied ancient history and Oriental studies in Leipzig, T?bingen and Berlin....
, Bernard Pyne Grenfell
Bernard Pyne Grenfell

Bernard Pyne Grenfell was an England scientist and egyptologist, member of the The Queen's College, Oxford.With his friend and colleague, Arthur Hunt, he took part in the archaeological dig of Oxyrhynchus and discovered many ancient manuscripts, including some of the oldest known copies of the New Testament and the Septuagint....
, Arthur Surridge Hunt  and other distinguished scientists.

The collection of pagan, Christian and Arabic papyri
Papyrus

Papyrus is a thick paper material produced from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland Cyperaceae that was once abundant in the Nile Delta of Egypt....
 in Vienna called the Rainer papyri represents the first large discovery of manuscripts on papyrus found in the Fayum in Egypt
Egypt

Egypt is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Western Asia. Covering an area of about , Egypt borders the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Gaza Strip and Israel to the northeast, the Red Sea to the east, Sudan to the south and Libya to the west....
. About 1880 a carpet trader in Cairo acquired on behalf of Karabacek over 10,000 papyri and some texts written on linen. Of those over 3000 are written in Arabic. The papyri originated from Kôm Fâris (Krokodílon Pólis) and Ihnasiyyah al-Madinah (Herakleopolis Magna
Herakleopolis Magna

Herakleopolis Magna is the Greek language name of the capital of the Twentieth nome of ancient Egypt. It was called Henen-nesut, Nen-nesu, or Hwt-nen-nesu in Egyptian language, meaning 'house of the royal child.' Later, it was called Hnas in Coptic language, and Ahnas in medieval Arabic language writings....
), the textile pages from Kôm al-‘Azâma. They were exported to Vienna in 1882, and presented in a public exhibition the following year that caused a sensation. Later the papyri were bought by the Grand Duke Rainer and presented to the Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften in Vienna.

Footnotes


See also


  • Leiden Conventions
    Leiden Conventions

    The Leiden Conventions are an established set of rules, symbols, and brackets used to indicate the condition of an Epigraphy or Papyrology text in a modern edition....
  • Oxyrhynchus
    Oxyrhynchus

    Oxyrhynchus is a city in Upper Egypt, located about 160 km south-southwest of Cairo, in the governorate of Al Minya Governorate. It is also an archaeological site, considered one of the most important ever discovered....
  • Greek Magical Papyri
    Greek magical papyri

    The Greek Magical Papyri is a collective term for a collection of texts, written mostly in Ancient Greek , found in the deserts of Egypt, which cast light in some way on the magico-religious syncretistic world of Greco-Roman Egypt and the surrounding area....
  • Elephantine papyri
    Elephantine papyri

    The Elephantine Papyri are a collection of ancient Jewish manuscripts dating from the 5th century BC Common Era. They come from a Jewish community at Elephantine, then called Yeb, the island in the Nile at the border of Nubia, which was probably founded as a military installation in about 650 BCE during Manasseh's reign to assist Pharaoh...
  • Magdalen papyrus
    Magdalen papyrus

    The '"Magdalen" papyrus' was purchased in Luxor, Egypt in 1901 by Reverend Charles Bousfield Huleatt , who identified the Greek fragments as portions of the Gospel of Matthew and presented them to Magdalen College, Oxford, Oxford, where they are cataloged as P....
  • Nag Hammadi library
    Nag Hammadi library

    The Nag Hammadi library is a collection of Early Christianity Gnosticism Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper_Egypt town of Nag Hammadi in 1945....
  • EpiDoc
    EpiDoc

    The , building recommendations for structured markup language of epigraphy documents in Text Encoding Initiative XML, was originally formed in 2000 by scholars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Tom Elliott, the former director of the Ancient World Mapping Center, with Hugh Cayless and Amy Hawkins....
  • Epigraphy
    Epigraphy

    Epigraphy is the study of wikt:inscriptions or wikt:epigraphs engraved into stone or other durable materials, or cast in metal, the science of classifying them as to cultural context and date, elucidating them and assessing what conclusions can be deduced from them....
  • Writing systems
  • Palaeography
    Palaeography

    Palaeography, pal?ography , or paleography is the study of ancient handwriting, and the practice of deciphering and reading historical manuscripts....
  • University of Michigan Papyrus Collection
    University of Michigan Papyrus Collection

    The Papyrology Collection of the University of Michigan Library is an internationally respected collection of ancient papyrus and a center for research on ancient culture, language, and history....


External links