Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1983 - 37

Facsimile of the famous Ebers Papyrus , an important
Egyptian document on the use of herbal medicine and
magic.
to the ancient differences between a "book" hand and
cursive script. The book hand was used almost exclusively in copying works of literature; hence, it is
relatively stable. With two or three exceptions, its
letters have the shapes that continued through
the centuries, and still form the capital letters of
today's Greek alphabet. Naturally, changing fashions in the course of the centuries dictated stylistic
variations- a preference for an austere hand in
one text, for more embellishments (such as serifs) in
another ; narrower or vertical letters in vogue at
one time, slanting letters or broad-faced ones at another. But at all times the letters of the book hand
are set down individually, without ligatures, and also
without separation of words.
Cursives- "running" hands- comprise a more
complex study, since their aim is writing speed,
which gives rise to a great variety of forms and practices. The pioneers in papyrology had to teach first
themselves and then their students to recognize the
many different cursive letter forms and their evolution through the centuries- no mean task. In contrast to the standardized letters of the book hand,
cursives tend to round points and angles in letter
forms, and they introduce ligatures in order to string
letters together without removing the pen from
the page. Cursive is, in fact, the source of today's
lower-case Greek alphabet. Its evolution, which we
can trace in the papyri from the third century B.c.
to the eighth century after Christ, shows how A became oc, A became 5 , and so forth.
The task of deciphering cursives is complicated
by additional factors, such as the skill and idiosyncrasies of the individual writer, who might be a
professional scribe displaying his calligraphy, or
one scribbling quickly, abbreviating a great deal and
letting mere squiggles stand as hints for certain

letters. At the other extreme, the writer might be an
illiterate peasant, barely able to sign his name in
clumsy letters traced with great effort. Even the
most experienced of papyrologists will find it difficult to read certain hands. The work gets easier,
however, when the reader recognizes one or another
of the many clichés, stereotypes and conventional
formulations which characterized the language
of business and government, then as now. But some
scrawls have steadfastly defied all efforts to unravel them.
The more readable book hands can become
difficult, too, when the papyrus is so damaged that
the ink is hard to see- or, for that matter, to find.
But identification is usually quick and easy when the
text is from a known work of literature. Even tiny
fragments can be easy to identify if they offer one or
more key words. There is a small scrap of papyrus,
not much bigger than a decorative postage stamp,
which contains a total of 65 letters in nine lines
of writing. These were found to contain the word
"Achaians." A Homeric dictionary quickly identified
the fragment as containing a remnant of verses
188-196 of Book 3 of the Iliad .
But where such obvious clues are lacking, recognition may occur belatedly, many years after publication. In 1936, a fragment was published not
three inches high and less than an inch wide, and
containing a mere two to seven letters on a line; it
was finally identified in 1977 as coming from a
copy of Demosthenes' speech On the Crown . Chance
and serendipity play a large part in such identifications, but papyrological scholars pursuing tenuous
leads have often shown remarkable powers of detection. Often pieces of the same papyrus are found
in different collections. This is not surprising,
since clandestine diggers commonly divide their
finds to share the profits, and more than one papyrus displays a straight edge that was obviously
made quite recently with a sharp knife or a pair of
scissors. Five fragments from a roll that contained
Aeschines' speech Against Timare hos are now
located in Geneva; they were published in 1909.
Three fragments from the same speech in Halle,
published in 1913, were long assumed to be from
another manuscript. In 1966, a Belgian scholar demonstrated where these two portions of the same
manuscript had originally joined. Examples, literary
and non-literary, can be multiplied: a Strasbourg
fragment fits neatly across the top of a papyrus in
Moscow; one half of a papyrus turns up in Florence,
the other half in Cairo; and so on. The most remarkable instance of matching involves a fragment
published in Cairo in 1925 and another in New York
in 1940. A British scholar saw that both of these
belonged with a third he was publishing in 1974; and
in 1980, a Dutch scholar discerned that they all
belonged with still another fragment located in
New York.
Such vignettes, however, engaging as they are, are
only the piquant caviar of the papyrologist's work.
The solid substance of papyrology's first hundred
years as a classical discipline lies in all the new
knowledge it has given us about Greece and Romeabout Greek language and literature, and about
private and public life in Classical antiquity.
1983
July/August

Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1983

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1983