Overview

Volume LXXXIII of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri continues our publication of biblical texts, including what is only the second Egyptian witness to the Epistle of Philemon as well as further early witnesses to the text of Mark and Luke, and an amateur copy of excerpts from Ezekiel’s Exagoge. Other sections offer new fragments from two popular genres: trials from the Acta Alexandrinorum, notably the trial of the former Prefect Titianus before Hadrian (an event sensational enough to reach the Historia Augusta); and adventures from the Greek Novel, including the Crimean narrative of Calligone and the Amazons. There is also a glimpse of the anonymous copyists to whom we owe our texts, practising the various graphic styles from which their customers could choose. Other documents contribute a mass of detail to the social and economic history of Roman and Byzantine Egypt, such as an official letter about the tax-grain destined to supply Rome; a tax-receipt that attests a Jewish community at Oxyrhynchus in the late fourth century; and, quite an extraordinary object, part of a ceremonial painted with a laurel wreath and a Latin inscription that celebrates the twentieth anniversary of some fourth-century emperor. The final section of the volume contains art: a fine pen-and-ink drawing of a rampant goat, and seven sketches on a single sheet, including a cockerel and a peacock, a wild boar, and a unicorn. As the Artemidorus papyrus has renewed discussion of drawing as an art in the Greek world, with some finding its own spread of drawings so striking as to suggest forgery, the new examples from Oxyrhynchus now demonstrate comparable technique and similar subject-matter in papyri of undoubted authenticity.

Full Product Details

9780856982316

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Peter J. Parsons is a British classicist and academic specialising in papyrology. He was Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford from 1989 to 2003 and Director of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project. In 1977, Parsons was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Nikolaos Gonis is Professor of Papyrology in the Department of Greek and Latin at Un iversity College London. His research interests include documentary and literary papyrology, Egypt from Augustus to the Abbasids, later Greek poetry, and early Christian literature.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available