Note: this topic is from 9/30/2002. Thanks vannrox.
Posted on 09/30/2002 1:22:08 PM PDT by vannrox
Rich pickings
The library of the Mouseion in Alexandria may have ceased to exist but evidence of what it once contained can be gleaned from fragments of papyri found elsewhere in Egypt, writes Jill Kamil.
Thanks to Egypt's dry climate and warm desert sand, papyrus texts in fragile and fragmentary form have survived from many sites -- among them Fayoum and Middle and Upper Egypt -- with the most expansive horde coming from Oxyrhynchus (modern Al-Bahnasa), a vast Graeco-Roman city once second in importance only to Alexandria.
Oxyrhynchus was little more than a mass of ruins when, back in 1895, the Egypt Exploration Fund (later Society) sent out three Oxford classical scholars to make a preliminary search for Greek papyri. Their hunt through the dump heaps of the ruined city were so rewarding that two more scholars, B P Grenfell and A S Hunt, made further searches at the same site between 1897 and 1907. Their discoveries were sensational.
There were public baths, scribe schools and gymnasia to cater for physical and military training, and a hippodrome and racecourse for spectator sports. Rich palaces and administrative halls accommodated a bloated bureaucracy at one end of the social scale, while at the other there were industrial centres for traditional crafts such as papyrus production to make writing paper. Calligraphers (who had various standards of expertise in Demotic, Greek, Coptic and Latin) copied manuscripts and bound them into books (codices) because, like Alexandria, Oxyrhynchus had a large reading public. More important, there appears to have been an active book trade between Oxyrhynchus and Alexandria. We can therefore build up a picture of intellectual life in the Mediterranean capital through the literary horde discovered in the provincial city.
Among the large quantities of papyri unearthed were The Paeans and other lost poems of Pindar, Alcaeus, and other poets, as well as the Ichneutae of Sophocles, the Hypsipyle of Euripides and an unknown poem by Sappho. In primary and secondary schools model texts were copied in various scripts, and Homer was the main Greek school text book. This education was not confined to the wealthy. Members of the middle class too pursued their schooling and the texts that have come to light include grammar, rhetoric, literature, mathematics and philosophical theses. They were written on papyrus, on pottery shards (ostraca), and on waxed tablets which could be wiped clean and reused. Reading was encouraged, and answering questions about Greek heroes was part of the job of a schoolmaster. There appear to have been professional reciters who were paid fees to recite classical tragedies and a host of novels and poems.
Like Alexandria, the provincial capital had a multi-cultural and highly stratified community. An estimated 30,000 individuals lived at Oxyrhynchus between the second and fourth centuries, and the population ranged from an élite -- the upper classes had town houses and country houses -- down the social scale to the working masses. There were temples to Egyptian, Greek and Asiatic gods; industrial centres where cobblers, weavers, and pottery manufacturers produced their wares; and next to granaries were the bake-houses and vats for beer-production.
Graeco-Roman Alexandria is believed to have had a Mediterranean outlook, while the rest of Egypt was generally regarded as the khora, the hinterland. The discovery of this wealth of literary material at Oxyrhynchus which dates from 250 BC to 700 AD, clearly reveals however, that intellectual, social and political institutions in Middle Egypt parallel those of cosmopolitan Alexandria. Even its architecture and artistic motifs appear to have been based on plans and designs from Alexandria. Architectural and decorative sketches for both buildings and textiles were found in the dump heaps.
Is it not timely, in view of the completion of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina -- which will be officially opened next month -- to include in the upgrading of Alexandria's Graeco-Roman Museum, one of the centres of classical heritage, some information on the science of papyrology? The subject has gained ground everywhere but in Egypt where the papyri were found. The texts from Oxyrhynchus are at Oxford; papyri found at Arsino‘ and other sites in the Fayoum depression, including Tebtunis, have become the nucleus of the Rainer collection at Vienna; collections in Berlin, the Louvre, and the British Museum are being studied by classical scholars from around the world. In Egypt, the study of papyrus texts unfortunately lags far behind.
I may be mistaken, but I thought the Fayum was located in an area near the Nile delta. If this is so, it would not be dry or conducive to preserving papyrus or anything organic. This is why the royal burials and other great caches of mummified remains have been concentrated in Upper Egypt.
[When the Muslims conquered Alexandria their leader said that anything written that was worthwhile was in the Koran. Everything else that wasn't in the Koran wasn't worth keeping.]
Finds in Ancient Egyptian rubbish dumps inspire “world’s largest archaeological project”
http://www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/archaeology/art547313-egyptology-ashmolean-museum-papyrus-archaeology-dumps
Dead Sea Scrolls Puzzle Pieces to Be Matched via Digitizing
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/dead-sea-scrolls-puzzle-pieces-to-be-matched-via-digitizing/2016/02/23/
Note: this topic is from 9/30/2002. Thanks vannrox.
Oops. Wrong Alexandria.
;’) Some good restaurants there.
How WONDERFUL!
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