Skip to main content

A Material Study of the Scribe X Papyri: Demotic in Kalamos Pen in the Late Ptolemaic Grapheion at Theogonis

This paper supplies an investigation of the materials used to produce the papyri of the anonymous scribe (“Scribe X”) from the late Ptolemaic grapheion in Theogonis near Tebtunis, Egypt. This archive of over fifty bilingual documents, in Demotic and Greek, was first examined by Richard Parker in 1972, then later by Brian Muhs, Jacco Dieleman, and Francisca A.J. Hoogendijk in the 2000s. This paper shall examine the papyri as artifacts, and focus on what they can tell us about the anonymous scribe’s material reality. These papyri are best presented through the lens of materiality due to their intriguing writing materials. Scribe X used the kalamos pen to write Demotic as well as Greek, a practice not widely adopted until the 1st c. CE, making this one of the earliest, if not the earliest instance of the use of the reed pen to write Demotic. Archaeological examinations of kalamos pens from Tebtunis shall be conducted and compared to detailed paleographic analysis of the papyri.

Another material of interest is the type of ink used by Scribe X, which shall be considered through x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF). This XRF analysis shows the elemental content of the ink used by the scribe to be absent of markers for mixed ink, suggesting that this scribe used the traditional carbon ink recipe. This late Ptolemaic archive offers the perfect opportunity to examine writing tools, as Hella Eckardt has aptly stated: “it is often only possible to really ‘see’ writing technology at points of change, as otherwise its use is so habitual as to go unchallenged.” The shift to increasing Greek documentation in the late Ptolemaic period is precisely such a moment of change that offers an explanation for this scribal anomaly. The shift from Egyptian to Greek necessitated a shift from rush to reed. This scribe adopted the reed pen upon learning Greek and continued using it, while remaining with the traditional Egyptian ink recipe that had been in use for millennia.