pp. 97-99, 1894. J. H. Ropss.
PAPYRI.—The manner in which papyrus was used as writing-material in the ancient world, the dates of its adoption and abandonment, and the countries in which it was employed, have been described in vol. iv. of this Dictionary (art. WRITING). The object of the present article is to show what actual writings on papyrus, bearing upon the study of the Bible, have come down to us, and what kind of information is to be derived from them,
i, THE DISCOVERIES oF PAPyRI.— The first papyrus rolls to be brought to light were the
roduct of the excavations on the site of Hercu- aneum in the middle of the 18th century. In 1752 a small room was discovered, which proved to be a library; and on the shelves round its walls were found several hundreds of rolls, calcined to the semblance of cinders by the eruption of Vesuvius, which buried the town in A.D. 79. These, how- ever, when patiently unrolled and deciphered, were found to contain philosophical treatises of the Epi- curean school, and do not concern us here. All other papyri that have hitherto come to light are derived from Egypt, where alone the conditions of soil and climate are such as to admit of the pre- servation of so perishable a material. The date of the first discovery of papyri in Egypt is 1778, when a collection of rolls was discovered by fellaheen, probably in the Fayum; but, since no purchaser was immediately forthcoming, all were
estroyed but one, now in the Museum at Naples, containing a list of labourers in the reign of Com- modus. For a century after this date discoveries
were merely sporadic, though some important literary papyri were among the fruits of them.
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The first find upon a large scale was made in 1877, on the site of the city of Arsinoé, in the Fayum, from which several thousand papyri (nearly all fragmentary) were derived, most of which are now at Vienna. With this event the modern period of papyrus discovery begins, and the quarter of a century that has elapsed since that date has wit- nessed an ever-increasing flood of papyri, partly due to the systematic searches of European ex- plorers, and partly to the irregular zeal of ‘the natives. The principal localities from which papyri have been drawn are the Fayum, a detached pro- vince lying to the west of the Nile in Central Egypt, and the neighbourhoods of the towns of Oxyrhynchus, Hermopolis, Heracleopolis, and Thebes. They are found in the rubbish-heaps of buried towns or villages, in the cartonnage of mummy-cases of the Ptolemaic period (in which layers of papyrus, covered with plaster, took the lace of wood), and in cemeteries ; one remarkable iscovery (by Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt, on the site of the ancient Tebtunis) being that of a ceme- tery of crocodiles, in which the animals were found wrapped in rolls of papyrus, while other rolls had been stuffed inside them. There are now tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of papyri (the majority, no doubt, being mere fragments) in the possession of the museums and learned societies of Europe, many of which have not yet been un- soled. or deciphered. Some of these are literary works, relics of the books which once circulated among the educated classes, native or foreign, of Egypt; but the vast majority consists of non- literary documents, including official and com- mercial papers of all descriptions (census - rolls, tax -registers, receipts, petitions, sales, leases, loans, etc.), as well as private letters and accounts. It is from these that some of the most instructive materials for our present purpose are obtained.
ii. EGYPTIAN PAPyri.—The papyri of which we have chiefly to speak are Greek, belonging to the period after the conquest of Egypt by Alexander and the establishment of the Ptolemaic dynasty. But in addition to these some mention must be made of papyri in the ancient Egyptian language, which precede the Greek period or coincide with the earlier part of it; and in the later Egyptian lan- guage, commonly known as Coptic, which coincide with the latter part of the Greek period and con- tinue after the practical disappearance of Greek. Ancient Egyptian papyri have only an indirect bearing upon the study of the Bible. Concurrently with the monuments of stone, they give us records of the history of Egypt, with which that of the Hebrews is in contact in so many places ; while many of them contain copies of the Book of the Dead, the principal document of the Egyptian religion, with which the Israelites may possibly have become acquainted to some extent through their intercourse with their neighbours. These are written in hieroglyphics, the earliest form of writing practised in Egypt. Two other forms were successively developed from it—the hieratic and the demotic. Hieratic papyri are relatively scarce, and contain nothing to our purpose ; de- motic are very difficult to translate, and are mostly of the nature of business documents or stories. One document of the latter class, written about the end of the Ist cent., has been held to show certain resemblances to the narrative of the Nativity of our Lord; but the resemblance is, in truth, very slight and unessential (Griffith, Stories of the High Priests of Memphis, 1900, pp. 43, 44). On the whole, therefore, the later Egyptian papyr1 contain little that concerns the biblical student as such.