Modifying My Own Personal Image of Hesiod

I don't remember which I got first, a few volumes of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri I came across in a used-book store, or a copy of the 1990 third edition of Solmson, Merklebach and West's Oxford Classical Texts Hesiod. Both happened around 2003 to 2005. I'm very bad at recalling exactly when things happened.

It just occurs to me, just at this very moment, while writing this, that perhaps the reason I'm so fascinated by learning and memorizing historical dates is because I'm so bad at remembering dates in my own life. Maybe the obsession with historical dates is in part overcompensation for the weakness in recalling dates in my own life.

It's remarkable, how many insights I have while writing essays.

Onward. I do remember that finding the volumes of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri in that bookstore, was the first that I had ever heard of the city of Oxyrhynchus. Like so many others before and after me, I looked into the subject and became enthralled by the story of the largest single find, by far, of ancient Classical texts.

I know: most of the texts discovered at Oxyrhynchus and edited so far have been of a quotidian nature, and that these glimpses into everyday life in the eastern Roman Empire from the 3rd century BC to the 6th century AD are the main attraction of the papyri for many historians. And for Biblical scholars, the Biblical, apocryphal and other early Christian papyri found at Oxyrhynchus are so important that, in some cases, they do not seem to realize, or in any case to particularly care, that these Christian papyri are only a small fraction of the entire find.

That's one of many pleasant aspects of the Oxyrhynchus find: it's so huge and varied that many different groups of scholars have each found their own field transformed.

For me, the most exciting Oxyrhynchus finds are the Classical texts, and especially the re-discoveries of missing Classical texts, and to me, right from the very first volumes of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri which I ever saw, the most spectacular of these have seemed to be the many fragments of missing text of Hesiod's Catalogue of Women, which, before Oxyrhynchus, had been more of a rumor than an ancient text, a dubious attribution to Hesiod, and which, after Oxyrhynchus, occupies 79 pages in that 1990 OCT edition of Hesiod. The reason why there was a third edition of the Oxford Classical Texts Hesiod by 1990, not to mention numerous revisions of other editions by Oxford and other publishers, was that more and more papyri kept coming to light, giving occasion to update not just the text of the Catalogue of Woman, but also of Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, which had never been lost, but which, before the great finds of papyri beginning late in the 19th century, were known mostly from 15th-century manuscripts, and from no manuscript older than a solitary one from the 10th century. The Oxyrhyncus papyri of Hesiod, by contrast, are all 6th century or older, mostly 3rd century or older, and a few of them are BC.

Until very recently, I thought that Hesiod had flourished around 800 BC, because two different editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, that of 1951 and also that of 1972, told me so. I came across the date of fl ca 700BC in other sources, but I assumed, for a long time, that they were mistaken and Britannica was correct. I finally figured out that Britannica was mistaken, and, as you can see if you consult the newest Britannica in paper or online, someone at Britannica finally noticed the error as well and fixed the typo.

For me, it was very disappointing to find out that Hesiod had flourished a century later than I had thought, and it required that I considerably revised my imagining of the earliest alphabetic Greek writing. And then I learned that the great unearthing of fragments of the Catalogue of Women, although doing away with the earlier controversy over whether or not the work had actually ever existed, had by no means convinced everyone that Hesiod had written it. More recently still, within just a few days, I've had to do some more mental revision, upon learning that the experts no longer all agree that Hesiod was a real person, any more real than Homer (assuming, as some but not all do, that there was no Homer).

Should I assume that still more Hesiodic papyri will be found and will shed more light on the Hesiodic Question and other questions? Over the course of my life I have tended to become more cautious about assuming anything. I will continue to try to catch up with the work of others, and wait and see what further evidence comes to light. On the other hand, it is very hard for me to believe that there will be no further finds of text of Hesiod -- or, if you prefer to emphasize your doubt of his existence, of "Hesiod."

Papyri of the Iliad; Also: Academic Conventions

In my recent blog post entitled Manuscripts, I wrote:

"[...]several months ago, I sent a email to a distinguished scholar, asking him whether he could round out some areas of my knowledge of the Oxyrhynchus papyri project: Are any of the papyri still in the boxes Grenfell and Hunt put them into between 1897 and 1904? Are we approaching the state of things where all that is left are tiny little pieces of papyrus? Questions like that.

"He hasn't gotten back to me. That hurts my feelings, but it's entirely his prerogative, of course. Finally today I sent an email to the general guestions-and-suggestions-etc address of the Oxyrhynchus project, which is perhaps where I should've inquired to begin with."

In Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, Munich & Leipzig, 2000, p 87, M L West writes that, as the Egypt Exploration Society wished, he did not give any details of the 850 unpublished Oxyrhynchus papyri (Correction: 827 unpublished papyri used by West in his edition, plus 23 first published in Manfrdi et al, Papiri dell'Iliade, Florence, 2000. I think. Much of what I write in CI and about Classics on my blog should be proofread by experts before anyone thinks of taking it seriously, because of things I don't know and full-time academics do know.) used in his edition of the Iliad, 1998--2000, and he thanks them for their permission to now include their inventory numbers and summary details in his catalog of papyri of the Iliad, which contains a total of 1569 items.

Because of those details, I can see that those 850 papyri which in 2000 were either unpublished or published for the first time, are certainly not inconsequential little scraps. They seem generally to be about as big as most of the Homeric papyri already published. This does not give the impression that the Oxyrhynchus project is almost all out of significant papyri. I need to try to find out how many more have been published in the last 18 years, and discovered in that time, if the existence of those latter have been made known to the public.

To judge from West's pointed expression of thanks to the Egypt Exploration Society for their permission to divulge details about unpublished papyri, maybe the reason that neither the above-mentioned distinguished scholar nor anyone else from the EES has yet gotten back to me with details about unpublished papyri is that such details are conventionally thought of as proprietary secret knowledge of the EES, only rarely made public in extraordinary circumstances, such as when a scholar of West's stature is involved. I'm ignorant of the ways in which things are usually done in Classical Studies and papyrology, Perhaps I've been making making requests for information which are generally considered impolite at best. Consultation with some Classicists and papyrologists about mores and conventions, learning a little about the way things are usually done, certainly would do me no harm, and might save both myself and some scholars a great deal of future embarrassment.

Manuscripts

I derive great joy from learning about numbers of extant Classical manuscripts. I don't know why. It doesn't bother me that I don't know why. Perhaps it goes back no further than my figuring out, perhaps as recently as 2010, that certain fundamentalist Christians had made widely-repeated, spectacularly-inaccurate assertions about the numbers of manuscripts of some Classical authors, claiming that there were only 20 manuscripts of Livy, 10 of Caesar and similar nonsense.

A few months ago, I found what I had thought was a mention, somewhere in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, that the manuscripts of Aristotle are literally myriad. I looked up myriad in the OED and discovered that its literal meaning is 10,000.

My memory is not perfect, and for that and other reasons, I should write these sorts of things down more often when I come across them. I realized that what I had seen might not have been what I remembered it to have been. Finally, yesterday, I found it again: the assertion that the manuscripts of Augustine are literally myriad. Augustine. Not Aristotle. Score one for the Christians.

In the process of looking for the reference to Aristotle which was actually a reference to Augustine, I learned a lot of interesting things about Aristotelian manuscripts. Such as that there are very large numbers of manuscripts of Latin translations of his works.

Whether the number of manuscripts of translations of an author's works are conventionally counted in the number of manuscripts of that author -- that I don't know. If it turns out that, between Latin and Arabic and other languages, there actually are myriad manuscripts of translations of Aristotle, would one conventionally say that there are myriad manuscripts of Aristotle? Or would one count only the Greek manuscripts?

Also several months ago, I sent a email to a distinguished scholar, asking him whether he could round out some areas of my knowledge of the Oxyrhynchus papyri project: Are any of the papyri still in the boxes Grenfell and Hunt put them into between 1897 and 1904? Are we approaching the state of things where all that is left are tiny little pieces of papyrus? Questions like that.

He hasn't gotten back to me. That hurts my feelings, but it's entirely his prerogative, of course. Finally today I sent an email to the general guestions-and-suggestions-etc address of the Oxyrhynchus project, which is perhaps where I should've inquired to begin with.

Also a few months ago, I found a reference to a list of manuscripts of Livy compiled by Virginia Brown. I have since learned that Ms Brown compiled all sorts of information about manuscripts which I would find quite interesting. Just today I noticed a remark by Prof Winterbottom in Texts and Transmission, ed LD Reynolds, pp 35-36: "Virgina Brown has listed seventy-five manuscripts [of Caesar --SB] later than the ninth century, and suggested tentative groupings." In the case of the Livy manuscripts, someone in the FB group Classics International kindly gave me a link to the Pontifical publication containing Ms Brown's list -- but, as has so often happened to me, once I've found the website of some sort of Classical catalog or database or publication, I had no idea how to navigate it.

It seems to me that all of these difficulties and many more which I've had are the sort which could be easily handled if I were a Classics student, rubbing elbows with other Classics students and with Classics professors: Say, do you know how to navigate this website? The answer could be: Yes, you just do this and that; or: No, but there's a hard copy of the volume on the shelf right behind you.

I don't think I'll be re-entering grad school. (I'm 56 years old and just as autistic as I ever was. [That's an autism joke, because an autistic person is born autistic and remains so his or her entire life.]) But today I feel slightly more inclined to do so than I have for a while.

Just in case anyone is politely suppressing the urge to ask whether I've ever actually examined any Classical manuscripts -- yes I have, both via photocopies and actually up close in person. But I've spent much more time studying numbers of manuscripts.

[PS, 21 Feb 2018: Speaking of numbers of manuscripts: today I received an inter-library loan copy of M L West's Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad. Some of you may already be familiar with the following figures. They came as quite a surprise to me. On p 86, West says that around the turn of the 20th century, Ludwich cited 33 papyri of the Iliad, that Munro and Allen listed 103 in 1920, Allen raised that number to 122 in 1931, Collart listed 372 in 1948, Pack listed 464 in 1965, in 1990 Sutton said that there were 703, and West says that in his edition of 1998-2000, he made use of 1543, 850 of which were then-unpublished Oxyrhynchus papyri in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. West writes of Homeric papyri: "They will continue to accumulate. There is no end to them." On pp 88-129, West catalogues 1569 papyri. By the term "papryi," West refers to all ancient manuscripts, whether written on papyrus or some other material. On p 139, West doubts that a thorough catalog of the Medieval manuscripts of the Iliad will ever be written. (Because there are simply too many items to be considered? I don't know. West doesn't elaborate.)

West passed away in 2015, his edition of the Odyssey was published in 2017, and De Gruyter's website says that it consults 500 papyri, 250 of them unpublished.]

The Term "Textus Receptus" Doesn't Always Refer To The Bible

Not everyone has had the advantages I have. Before I became mixed up with all of these lunatics arguing about the Bible and Jesus and related things, I had already become somewhat familiar with Classical scholarship in general and the editors of ancient Latin in particular. Because of that, I was aware that people discussing the Bible use some terms as if they applied only to the Bible, while those terms actually have more broad uses.

There's the term "textus receptus," Latin for "received text." Some people are using this term to refer to several 16th-century printed editions of the Greek New Testament, and nothing else. But since well before the 16th century, the term "textus receptus" has referred to most familiar or generally-accepted form of any text, Biblical or not.

(And by the way, it is not true that the makers of the King James Version referred only to one of those 16th-century printed editions when preparing their version of the New Testament. I know it is not true, because they made many notes referring to differences between this "textus receptus" and various manuscripts.)

I think I've mentioned before on this blog that I've seen the term "Oxyrhynchus papyri" used to refer to ancient Biblical manuscripts on papyrus found at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, as if those were the only papyri found at Oxyrhynchus, when in fact, out of the over 5000 Oxyrhynchus papyri published so far (out of more than 1 million excavated), only a small fraction have to do with Christianity in any way.

People often use the terms "textual transmission" (the process by which a text goes from the author to the reader) and "textual criticism" (examining the manuscripts and/or other evidence of a text and attempting to restore as nearly as possible the original text) as if they had only to do with the Bible, when actually they are applied to any and all texts, and very frequently to ancient non-Christian Latin and Greek texts, as well as Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Flaubert or whom have you.

The term "Codex Vaticanus" is widely used these days, it seems, to describe one Biblical manuscript, although the phrase "Codex Vaticanus" actually means nothing more than "manuscript in the Vatican Library," and there are lots and lots of manuscripts in the Vatican Library." A more proper designation for this particular Biblical manuscript is Vat. gr. #1209, Vatican Library Greek manuscript number 1209. You can see the phrase "Codex Vaticanus" applied to many other manuscripts in the writing of Classical scholars. But since there are so many manuscripts in the Vatican Library, these scholars generally provide a key at the beginning of each piece of such writing, giving a more precise definition of what they mean by "Codex Vaticanus" -- or, if the piece of writing refers to more than one manuscript from the Vatican Library, which is not at all usual, the key may inform the reader that throughout the text, for example, "M" will refer to Vatican Library Latin manuscript #3225, "P" will refer to Vatican Library Palatine Collection manuscript #1631, and so forth. M because the manuscript belonged to the Medici before the Vatican acquired it, P for Palatine. These examples are the abbreviations used by RAB Mynors in his edition of Vergil, published in 1969. He doesn't use the phrase "Codex Vaticanus" to refer to every manuscript of Vergil in the Vatican Library which he has used in the preparation of this edition, because 6 of the 21 manuscripts he used are from the Vatican Library.

The 27th edition of the Nestle/Aland Greek New Testament makes use of dozens if not hundreds of New Testament manuscripts from the Vatican Library (in addition to thousands of other New Testament manuscripts from elsewhere), and, since "Codex Vaticanus" means nothing more or less in Latin than "manuscript from the Vatican Library," the editors of that edition came up with a different abbreviation to refer to each one.

I don't know how often actual legitimate Biblical scholars use such terms as if they were never used outside of Biblical studies or in their literal Latin meanings, or whether this is just one more example of Wikipedia and TV shows about the Bible conspiring to make mankind more stupid. Some of the articles on Wiki having to do with textual transmission and textual criticism have recently been improved to more clearly indicate that these things do have a life apart from Biblical studies. (Years ago I used to make some corrections on Wiki myself, but I stopped because they weren't paying me enough.) A Google search for textus receptus might give you the impression that the term never meant anything other than those 16th-century printed editions of the Bible. (Btw, in Classical studies, "edition" is usually used to mean "printed edition," as opposed to "manuscript.") The sheer number of Web pages using the term "textus receptus" in this narrow sense drown out the others, unless you refine your search extensively. You have to search for something like "textus receptus" -bible -testament -gospel in order to get results indicating that this is not all just about the Bible.

The Library At Ancient Alexandria

I like that movie with Rachel Weisz, I like it a lot,



but it's not a strictly historical documentation, it's a work of imagination. There is no evidence that Hypatia was interested in the theory of heliocentrism. She certainly could have been. But we don't have any evidence of it.

We know for sure, though, that the destruction of the library at Alexandria and the murder of Hypatia did not happen in the same big riot. In AD 391 the Coptic Pope Theophilus (who was not one of the Roman Catholic Popes, the title "Pope" was used separately by Copts) ordered the destruction of the Serapeum, a pagan temple in Alexandria which may or may not have still contained a part of the great library's collection of manuscripts. No contemporary accounts of the destruction of the Serapeum mention the library. Hypatia was killed in 415 or 416, and contrary not only to Agora but also to many other films, novels, paintings and pseudo-historical books, she was likely around 60 years old at the time.

The Library might have been gone long before Hypatia was born. It might have been destroyed once, or badly damaged and then restored several times. Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, Ammianus and Orosius all claim that Julius Caesar destroyed the library in 48 BC when he was besieging Alexandria and set fires to his own ships and the fire spread first to the docks and then further into the city.

The next major candidate, chronologically, for the destruction of the library is the war in the 270's when the Emperor Aurelian suppressed a revolt led by Queen Zenobia of Palmyra. In the course of this war parts of the city which may have contained the library were badly damaged.

Then comes AD 391 and the closing of the Serapeum.

Then there was the Muslim conquest of Alexandria in 642. Several Muslim accounts of that conquest state that the great library was still there when the Muslims arrived, and was destroyed by them. However, the earliest of these accounts was written more than 500 years after the fact.

I think I can sum this up very nicely for you: anyone who says that they know when and how the library at Alexandria was destroyed, is wrong.

I might as well add: anyone who says that they know how big that library was, and how great the culture loss was when it was destroyed, is wrong also. Yes, it's quite reasonable to envision it as a very great and very regrettable loss. But there have been a very great number of losses of ancient Classical literature, occurring over many centuries, from Ireland to India. The cultural loss at Alexandria is just a small part of the overall loss.

But chin up, because some of that stuff is being re-discovered! Most spectacularly in the papyri found at Oxyrhynchus.

Writing From Jesus' Time And Place? What Writing Would That Be, Exactly?

It seems that some people have a distorted notion about the amount of ancient writing which has survived down to our time. They sometimes seem to think that the amount of written material from ancient Jerusalem is comparable to that of a big city today. They seem to imagine historians poring through the stacks of Jerusalem newspapers and police records from April and May, AD 33, and the diaries of Romans and Greeks vacationing in the city...

Newspapers didn't begin to appear until the 17th century, and whatever written records may have been kept by the Roman authorities in 1st-century Jerusalem are gone. We have a handful of such written records of ancient legal proceedings from anywhere in the Roman Empire, mostly from a few sites near the Nile in Egypt. After the actions of the authorities were carried out, the writing involved was thrown away. It seems it didn't occur to people back then to preserve such things. And when papyrus was thrown away, for the most part it rotted away very quickly. Those few sites near the Nile are very dry, which is good for preserving papyrus, and so we have found all sort of written documents in garbage dumps, above all the garbage dumps of the Egyptian town Oxyrhynchus. The Dead Sea Scrolls and some other ancient papyri have survived because they were stored in jars.

Most of the ancient Latin writing we have today was written in or fairly near the city of Rome, which was the cultural center of the Empire at the time. But very much even of the writing of the most highly-renowned ancient Roman writers has disappeared over the millennia. The ancient Romans considered Livy their best historian; only about 1/4 of his work has survived. The 2nd-most revered historian in ancient Rome was Tacitus, and 1/2 or more of his work has vanished. And Livy and Tacitus aren't unusual in this regard. This is how much ancient writing has vanished. We have only a fraction of many of the most highly-regarded writers. For many others, we have even less: a sentence or two, or just a mention in someone else's writing, or they've been forgotten altogether. Many of the most highly-regarded ancient writers.

The situation is similar in the case of Athens and the other major cities of ancient Greece. And peoples such as the Jews were much less favored by the Romans than were the Greeks, with the result that more of their culture, including their writing, has disappeared. And the Jews were much better favored than many other ancient peoples, who we only know by their names, or who have been forgotten altogether.

Most ancient Romans didn't know or care much about Judea and Galilee, and in the 1st century, indifference turned to hostility. There are a few lines here and there in ancient Latin and Greek in recognition of the crushing of the Jewish revolt from AD 66-70, and otherwise little mention of the place, except for the work of the authors of the New Testament and a couple of other Jewish writers, Josephus and Philo. And Philo was writing from far away in Alexandria. Without them, the modern world would have completely forgotten about Pontius Pilate until the 20th century, when a stone with a few words about him was excavated in Israel in the 20th century. (And without the New Testament and Josephus and Philo, would anyone today have any idea to whom the stone referred? I'm not asking rhetorically, I don't know the answer.) I keep mentioning the Pilate Stone on this blog because, from the point of view of most Romans of the time, Pilate would have been one of the most important people in Judea or Galilee. And, again, because there is so very little writing which survives from that time and place.

Other than the Pilate Stone and some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, I don't know of ANY writing we have today made in Judea or Galilee during Jesus' lifetime. I would imagine that there are a few more Roman inscriptions, but I don't happen to know. (Words carved into stone are called inscriptions by historians of the ancient Mediterranean world.) There probably was a lot of writing of various kinds in the Temple in Jerusalem which the Romans destroyed in AD 70. Maybe some more writing will turn up eventually, but for the time being these people who say things like, "We go through all the writings of his contemporaries and there's no mention if him" are talking through their hats: there are no big piles of records to go through. For Jesus' time and place, there are the New Testament and Josephus, and that's pretty much it. Add to that a couple of lines in the works of Tacitus and Suetonius and the younger Pliny, and some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Pilate Stone, and whatever parts of the other papyri found since the late 19th century can be said to have an historical, and not merely an imaginative connection to 1st-century Judea and Galilee. (Remember, most of those papyri have been found in Egypt, near the Nile. Ancient papyrus in most places tends to have rotted away.)

Oxyrhynchus Papyri

FIRST AND FOREMOST: MANY PEOPLE SEEM TO BE UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT ONLY BIBLICAL MANUSCRIPTS HAVE BEEN FOUND AT OXYRHYNCHUS. NO. ONE MILLION I SAID ONE MILLION PAPYRI HAVE BEEN FOUND AT OXYRHYNCHUS, AND 5257 HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED SO FAR, OF WHICH ONLY A SMALL FRACTION HAVE BEEN BIBLICAL. THE FINDS, COPIES MADE FROM THE 3RD CENTURY BC TO THE 7TH CENTURY AD, INCLUDE, BESIDES PERSONAL LETTERS, LEGAL DOCUMENTS, SHOPPING LISTS AND OTHER MUNDANE THINGS, HOMER, HESIOD AND MANY OTHER ANCIENT GREEK AUTHORS, LATIN AUTHORS SUCH AS LIVY, VERGIL AND SALLUST, AS WELL AS SOME COPTIC AND ARABIC TEXTS, AND JUST A VERY FEW IN HEBREW, ARAMAIC, SYRIAC AND PAHLAVI. MANY OF THE CLASSICAL GREEK AND LATIN TEXTS FOUND HERE HAD PREVIOUSLY BEEN LOST. OXYRHYNCHUS HAS TURNED THE STUDY OF ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE UPSIDE-DOWN IN A VERY, VERY GOOD WAY, AND IT'S ALSO BEEN QUITE NICE, ALTHOUGH IN A MUCH LESS SPECTACULAR WAY, FOR SCHOLARS OF LATIN AND COPTIC AND ARABIC.

SPIEGEL (the German news magazine), yr Datasierung or whatever you call it, the way you make the content of yr back issues available for Internet searches -- it sux!!

I was searching and searching for Ernst Jandl's reaction to winning a literary prize. I think it was the Buechner-Preis, just about the most prestigious and hoity-toity of all German literary prizes. Jandl won that prize about 20 years ago, and since then public opinion has caught up with him a bit. And he's died, which of course is the single best thing any artist can do for the commercial success and critical esteem of his work, but 20 years ago some people were upset that this guy who wrote poems like

lichtung

manche meinen
lechts und rinks
kann man nicht velwechsern
werch ein illtum!

which, take my word for it, is really funny and also a brilliant poem -- people were upset that this weirdo Jewish guy had gotten the Buechner-Preis. (Although they didn't complain publicly a whole lot about the part about him being a Jew.)

And I was searching for that damn SPIEGEL-story announcing Jandl winning some prize, I think it was the Buechner-Preis, wherin it said that his first words upon hearing that he'd won were something like "Ich bin ganz bestuerzt." ("I'm shocked.") or "Ich bin entsetzt." ("I'm apalled.") Whatever is was, it, too, was brilliant, the most brilliant reaction I've heard yet to a person's winning a prestigious award.



And the reason I bring that up is that I would be both shocked and appalled if anyone considered me to be a reliable source of information. Specifically, I worry that I may have given some misinformation about the Oxyrhynchus papyri on this blog.

I corrected one such mistake today: I had written that over 100 volumes of the Oxyrhynchus papyri have been published so far. In fact, volume LXXX was published last year. I think there may be other errors which I didn't find, because years ago I often did a really terrible job of labeling my blog posts. For example, I'm pretty sure I've told people that over 10,000 Oxyrhynchus papyri have been published. In fact, volume LXXX brings the grand total to 5257. Out of about 1,000,000 papyri found at Oxyrhynchus. Some good news is that the publishers have radically reduced the prices of many of those 80 volumes. By how much? By this much: the most recent volumes are selling on Amazon for $170 a pop, but volumes as recent as Volume LXXII, from 2008, are going for $20, brand-ass new.



There are better sources of information about papyri than I. There are the aforementioned 80 volumes containing the texts of the papyri, translations, commentary and photos. Iss a Ding!

GW Schwendner of Wichita State University publishes a stupendous blog called What's New in Papyrology. The blog contains so much information about the current haps in the field, and it's updated so often, that the main problem is just wading through the enormous amount of information. A good problem to have.

The University of Heidelberg has a very impressive papyrology website.

Oxford University is the one that owns the great majority of those 1,000,000 Oxyrhynchus papyri and the one which has published the aforementioned very fine 80 volumes of 5257 papyri since 1898. And don't worry, they've found some ways to speed up the process of editing and publishing those papyri, so that, although much yet remains to be done and publishing everything will take quite a while, it isn't expected to take 15,229 years. They're doing lots of good work on these papyri and are to be highly commended.

They are not to be commended on their Oxyrhynchus papyrii website. It contains a lot of information, including, for example, images of many, perhaps all (the website sucks so hard that it's difficult to be sure) of the 5257 papyri which have been published so far. But that wealth of information is presented very poorly, and the site seems to be updated only every 5 years or so, by a moron. (It needed to be said.)

And to return to my shortcomings: I have a very bad feeling that "papyri" may be misspelled many, many times on this blog, with 2 i's on the end instead of 1: "papyrii" instead of "papyri." I am appalled.

A Spy in the House of Hate

Anaïs Nin referred to herself as a spy in the house of love: she was caught up in a sexual revolution, but far from being its advocate, she found it all a bit silly.

I'm interested in archaeology, and so I find myself getting caught up in arguments between Jews, Muslims and many others who take one side or the other and draw political conclusions from archaeological finds, supporting contemporary hatreds with their interpretations of artifacts thousands of years old. Which I find more than a little bit silly. I'd like to just study the artifacts and learn. I wonder how many of the people weighing in on Tel Dan or Qumran or Khirbet Qeiyafa would have one thing to say about them if they didn't have any opinions about Middle Eastern politics today.

Romans stole huge chunks of Greek mythology, but as far as I know Italians and Greeks are not fighting over that today, nor are hateful blockheads the world over, purporting to support one side or the other, hurling political invective at each other mixed with superficial knowledge of finds at Paestum or Troy. Would that be different if Graeco-Roman religion were as alive today the world over as the Abrahamic religions? More to the point, of course, would a nice bookish fellow such as myself be able to discuss Tel Dan or Khirbet Qeiyafa without being interrupted by haters if the Abrahamic religions were as dead as the cults of Olympus? I just want to understand what happened thousands of years ago when I examine such things, not contribute to madness which is seething today.

Anyway, the nuts are doing a fine job of ruining a discussion of Khirbet Qeiyafa for me today. They don't eff things up when the topic is Oxyrhynchus. On the other hand, out here so far from academia where I live, the topic very rarely is Oxyrhynchus. I generally just study the papyri on my own. I hope it doesn't stay that way.

Proof

The atheist community has grown much more visible and audible in the past few years. I don't know whether it would be accurate to say that it has actually grown considerably. Over and over one hears from people who had been atheist for a long time, but never spoke up about it, and felt alone. Then came Richard Dawkins.I know that it's customary to mention a couple of other famous authors along with Dawkins, but I don't feel like it. I think those other guys are a bit silly, especially the younger one with his warmed-over Utilitarianismand his spirituality, and I also think that the other guys are basically riding in Dawkins' wake, that Dawkins is still the only "new" atheist who is both an intellectual heavyweight, and popular. [PS, 29. November 2015: Unfortunately, I had not read any of Dawkins' atheistic writing before I wrote this, and I simply assumed, based on having read some of his work on biology, that his writing on religion would be just as good. In the meantime I've read some of his writing on religion, and there's nothing remotely heavyweight about any of it. Sorry.]

As with any group with mass visibility, there are some dopes among the suddenly-visible large mass of atheists. These include a few popular authors and many simple-minded people repeating memes such as that the Old Testament was written by illiterate Bronze Age shepherds [PS, 13. December 2016: When I first posted this, in 2010, I didn't realize that it was Dawkins himself who had started the "Bronze Age Goat herders" meme. (I don't know whether Dawkins has ever actually asserted that the Bible was written by illiterates.)], (This meme is morphing from Broze Age to Neolithic and even Paeleolithic.) and, for example, the certainty that Jesus never existed. That last meme even has a couple of very popular websites all to itself.

People on all sides -- not all of them, just the dumb ones, but Lord there are a lot of dumb ones on all sides -- seem to come to conclusions about ancient history based on metaphysical preconceptions. They believe in God, they were raised Christian, and so they believe that Jesus existed. Or they don't believe in God, they were raised atheist, or, very often, they had unhappy Christian childhoods, and so they believe Jesus never existed. Each side repeats its talking points ad nauseum and does not investigate the matter, and also does not examine the soundness of its talking points. I often quarrel with the other atheists just because I feel a sort of duty to try to clean up our side of the street. What's the point of rejecting all that traditional religious dogma only to embrace a whole cartload of equally-unsound, equally-unexamined atheist myth? "If Jesus existed, why didn't any ancient authors write about him?" Well, Sparky, some ancient authors did write about him. The writings of some of them are referred to as the New Testament, those of some others are called New Testament apochrypha. "Okay, but they were all believers. Why don't we have any eyewitness accounts of him from non-Christian authors?" Do you think there were several daily newspapers in Jerusalem back then, and that every day's news is preserved on microfilm? so that we can go through all the records of the crucifixions and palm-frond-covered donkey parades? There was next to no non-Christian historical record of Pontius Pilate, the governor of the whole province, until an inscription was unearthed a few decades ago which makes it seem like that, yeah, Pilate did exist. That's the governor of the whole province. If you think that it's somehow suspicious that there's no surviving official record of the arrest, trial or execution of a convicted traitor who had all of twelve, count 'em twelve followers, you don't know much about the state of our knowledge of things in Judea 2,000 years ago.

"Well, the existence or non-existence of Jesus can never be proven anyway, so why bother to even look into such ancient matters?" Let me take the second part first. Why? Because milk has no bones. That's why. And as to the first part, to assert that it could never be proven that a Jesus of Nazareth was a wandering preacher who was executed for treason on Pilate's orders reveals ignorance of how much our knowledge of the ancient world around the Mediterranean, and east of there, is increasing. I mentioned that inscription they found a few decades ago mentioning Pilate. One example of a huge amount of finds since the late 19th century which continue to expand our knowledge. There are the Dead Sea Scrolls.There is the Nag Hammadi library.There are the Oxyrhynchus Papyri,about 100 volumes of them published so far and still going. [CORRECTION, 18. July 2015: 80 volumes and counting, as of 2014, containing 5253 papyri] Not to mention Menander,the ancient Greek author of comic plays, of whose work before the 20th century we possessed only fragments, brief quotations in the work of other authors, and now, BOOM! chaka-laka-laka we've got several nearly-complete plays. Just a few of the highlights from the list of manymany ancient things archaeologists keep digging up and deciphering between Morocco and Afghanistan. It's not impossible that proof of Jesus' existence could be found. Yes, many phony non-proofs have been foisted, the most recent being the notorious "James ossuary" publicized by that awful man who's not really an archaeologist but makes a jackass of himself on TV. But the fakes are no indication that real proof could never be found.

What would be real proof? Well, for example, a letter by Pilate to a friend could do the trick. "I had a strange day today. The Sanhedrin brought me a man, Jesus, from Nazareth, a village to the north of here in Herod's territory, who seemed as harmless as a newborn puppy, but they insisted that he was very dangerous. I spoke to him personally because I gathered that, although from a family of commoners, he was fluent in several languages, an unusual combination in these parts. I greeted him in my rusty Aramaic, he responded in very polished Greek and Latin and offered to converse with me in whatever language I wished. And so we conversed in Greek. As gentle as a lamb, and he spoke no overt treason, just religious tales of symbolic dreams and a world other than the Earth. I was charmed by him and gave him several opportunities to contest the charges against him, of blasphemy against his own people and treason against ours, and yet he refused to say the few words which would have released him from suspicion. I truly think he wanted to be executed, the poor strange fool. To be some sort of sacrifice to atone for the sins of mankind. I gave him one more chance: one of the local people's holy days is approaching. Four criminals, including this Jesus, were awaiting execution. I called for the city's people to gather before the prison, had the four condemned men led before them and said that in honor of the upcoming holy day, one of these men, whomever they chose, would be pardoned and freed. The rabble chose a murderer and screamed for the blood of this Jesus. Strange. And so Jesus was nailed to a cross. I gather he's dead already, after just a few hours. Usually men last a day or longer on the cross. A strange and melancholy day."

I have no doubt that some such letters have already been faked. That doesn't mean that a real one will never be found. And of course it wouldn't have to include all the details of my imaginary letter. One fraction of all of that would suffice to turn ancient history all topsy-turvy, if found in a letter proven to be genuine.

And to me such a thing would be great, not because I tie metaphysical preconceptions to ideas of history, but because I don't. And also because the Jesus-never-existed crowd really annoys me. Such a find would please me greatly out of sheer spite for them. My esprit de corps with other atheists does not outweigh my dislike of stupidity. On the contrary, my atheism is but a subset of my disdain for stupidity. My atheism isn't so fragile that such a thing as a genuine letter from Pilate confirming Jesus' existence would ruffle it in the least.

The 8th Floor

I recently blogged about the Codices latini antiquiores, a series of 12 volumes containing descriptions of all known manuscripts written in Latin before AD 800. I wrote the blog entry after finally seeing a copy of vol 1, which I got through inter-library loan. Well, yesterday -- I don't know why it took me so long. I live in Ann Arbor, after all -- I finally went to the Papyrology Department on the 8th floor of the University of Michigan Graduate Library, where they have 11 of the 12 volumes. That was some interesting browsing. I was looking at volume 11, concerning manuscripts currently held in Hungary, Luxembourg, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the United States and Yugoslavia. Each of the volumes is roughly the same size, describing 100 to 200 manuscripts or so, but Italy, France and Germany take up the first 9 volumes. Those three countries are where the significant Latin manuscripts mostly are. It was interesting, paging through vol 11, to see what treasures are tucked away in unexpected, exotic -- from the point of view of this academic discipline -- locations. The Pierpoint Library in New York City, it turns out, has a huge number of these pre-Carolingian Latin manuscripts. And then -- again, I don't know why it took so long for it to occur to me -- I looked up the University of Michigan, and sure enough, three items were listed as being housed there. Perhaps, for all, I knew, right on the other side of that locked steel door beside which I was sitting.

I could've asked someone about about that, asked to see the actual manuscripts, but there was already more than enough to entertain me in that small room on the 8th floor where a half-dozen people were excitedly huddled over microfilm viewers and computer screens and darting back and forth from their seats to the shelves and discussing things in several different languages including Latin and, I believe, ancient Greek and Egyptian, plenty to occupy my mind and justify future visits. Besides the CLA there were also many volumes of the Oxford Oxyrhychus papyrii series, and a series, which I didn't get around to inspecting at all yesterday, with a title very similar to Codices latini antiquiores, Codices latini[...] something else, which the courteous library employee at first thought I was looking for -- I mumble sometimes -- and many other things, many reasons for further visits to the 8th floor. There was a book printed in the 19th century entitled Das Antike Buchwesen in Seinem Verhaltniss zur Litteratur."Buchwesen," I don't even know for sure what exactly that means, but I'm pretty sure that it's one of those wonderful German words which would be very difficult to translate into English, perhaps impossible to translate even half-well without using a lot of English words. Shelved near that book was another with a title something like Das Buchwesen im Mittelalter, Buchwesen in the Middle Ages. I'm hoping that "Buchwesen" includes statistics or at least estimates of the numbers of books in circulation in the Roman Empire and medieval Europe, because that's something about which I've been very curious, but unable to find much information at all. Perhaps German scholarship has been all over such questions for over a century. Those wacky Germans, you gotta love 'em.

Besides the items pertaining to Latin, there were lots of things having to do with ancient Greek in that little room on the 8th floor, probably lots more than to do with Latin. (This would make sense, because this it the Papyrology Department after all, and as far as I know, many times more ancient papyrii written in Greek have been preserved and discovered than those written in Latin.) I saw a lot of things pertaining to ancient Egyptian writing. I saw a few volumes of documents in Coptic edited by E. A. Wallis Budge. I saw things pertaining to many other languages. There is so much gloriously fascinating stuff in this world, and I've just discovered a place where quite a lot of it which interests me personally is concentrated.