Mike Sampson (University of Manitoba)
In this paper, I consider two ancient books (TM 59973 and TM 60527) whose fragments were acquired by different collections in different circumstances, a common enough phenomenon during the heyday of papyrological acquisitions. Although one goal of papyrology is to reunite such ‘relatives’, I am more interested in exploring the individual objects’ discrete histories. The books’ fragmentation, I argue, contains important lessons for papyrological methodology in the present and a corrective to the discipline’s reconstructive tendency.
The story of TM 59973 begins Feb. 2, 1891, when the British Museum purchased a fragment of a medical treatise (P.Lond.Lit. 166) with choliambic verse (TM 59438) on its verso. The source was the Rev. Greville John Chester (Kalbfleisch 1902), an important figure in colonial Egyptology whose activities and philanthropy benefitted numerous British institutions (Seidmann 2006). In 1926, some thirty-five years later, another fragment of this book (P.Cair.Mich. 2.10) was excavated at Karanis, in house B12, along with eleven other documents, subsequently repatriated (Haug 2021). With reconstruction in mind, its editor notes that “we can now be sure [the London papyrus] was found somewhere in Karanis” (Leith 2015; my emphases).
The second papyrus (P.Aberd. 145) was acquired by James Grant Bey circa 1887 (Schwendner 1988) and donated to the University of Aberdeen Museum in 1896, along with the rest of his antiquities. Grant is another titan in the history of colonial Egyptology, not least for mentoring a young Flinders Petrie upon his arrival in Egypt. Nearly half a century later, in 1932, additional fragments were excavated at Karanis. Andorlini (2001) supposed that the Aberdeen fragment was a surface find, but the Michigan ‘Record of Objects’ cross-references two findspots for the excavated pieces (32-C63N-A and 32-219*-M). One interpretation of the excavation data is that the papyrus “was partly derived from below the ground level of structure 219, possibly the structure above C63” (van Minnen 1998). Regardless, accounting for the first fragment in light of the second is challenging.
These cases are noteworthy for the data that illuminate their histories as archaeological objects. They also raise epistemological and methodological problems in the present. One involves the tendency to privilege excavation data, which in this case obscures the secondary role of archaeology and the decades-long interval between acquisitions. That secondary role is especially important because of the disturbance of Karanis’ archaeological record, which was was already clear to contemporary observers (Petrie 1891; Hogarth & Grenfell 1895–6; Grenfell et al. 1900) and which worsened as the kom was mined for sebakh. The precarity of Karanis’ archaeological context is further compounded by our imperfect understanding of the excavation data itself (Landvatter 2016). In concert, these problems warn against extending archaeological data onto the purchased fragments blindly and, by extension, the papyrological impulse to reconstruct. I therefore hope to illustrate how archaeological and archival data both shed light and cast shadows, and that we should address these and other papyri’s fragmentation and discrete origins before proceeding promptly to reunification.