ranging from the 1st century to the middle of the 3rd century. These papyri, being of an earlier date and in better condition than the Arsinoite collection, are consequently of greater palaeographical value. Most of them are now in Berlin; many are in the British Museum; and some are at Vienna, Geneva and elsewhere. The third and fourth great finds, and the most important of all, were made by Messrs Grenfell and Hunt when excavating, in the seasons 1896–1897 and 1905–1906, for the Egypt Exploration Fund, at Behnesa, the ancient Oxyrhynchus. Thousands of papyri were here recovered, including, among the non-literary material, a number of rolls in good condition, and comprising also a great store of fragments of literary works, among which occur the now well-known “Logia,” or “Sayings of Our Lord,” and fragments of the Scriptures, and in some instances of not inconsiderable portions of the writings of various classical authors. This great collection ranges in date from the 2nd century B.C. to the 7th century A.D.; but in what proportion the documents fall to the several centuries cannot be determined until the series of volumes in which they are to be described for the Graeco-Roman branch of the Egypt Exploration Fund shall have made some substantial progress.
These four great collections of miscellaneous documents have been supplemented by finds of other groups, which fit into them and serve to make more complete the chronological series. Such are the correspondence of a Roman officer named Abinnaeus, of the middle of the 4th century, shared between the British Museum and the library of Geneva in the year 1892; a miscellaneous collection, ranging from the 2nd century B.C. to the 3rd or 4th century A.D., acquired for the Egypt Exploration Fund and published by that society (Fayûm Towns and their Papyri, 1900); another collection obtained for the same society from the cartonnage of mummy-cases dating back to the 3rd century B.C. (The Hibeh Papyri, 1906); and a series recovered from excavations at Tebtunis for the University of California (The Tebtunis Papyri, 1902, 1906), generally of the 2nd century B.C. But of these lesser groups by far the most interesting is that which Mr Flinders Petrie extracted, in 1889–1890, from a set of mummy-cases found in the necropolis of the village of Gurob in the Fayûm. In the manufacture of these coffins numbers of inscribed papyri had been employed. The fragments thus recovered proved to be some of the most valuable documents for the history of Greek palaeography hitherto found, supplying us with examples of writing of the 3rd century B.C. in fairly ample numbers, and thus carrying back our fuller knowledge of the subject to a period which up to that time had remained almost a blank. Besides miscellaneous documents, there are included the remains of registers of wills entered up from time to time by different scribes, and thus affording a variety of handwritings for study; and, further, the value of the collection is enhanced by the presence of fragments of the Phaedo and Laches of Plato, and of the lost Antiope of Euripides and of other classical works.
The last decade of the 19th century was also distinguished by the recovery of several literary works of the first importance, inscribed on papyri which had been deposited with the dead, and had thus remained in a fairly perfect condition. In 1889 the trustees of the British Museum acquired a copy of the lost Ἀθηναίων Πολιτεία of Aristotle—a papyrus of the mimes of the poet Herodas, and a portion of the oration of Hypereides against Philippides; and in 1896 they had the further good fortune to secure a papyrus containing considerable portions of the odes of Bacchylides, the contemporary of Pindar. And to the series of the orations of Hypereides the Louvre was enabled to add, in 1892, a MS. of the greater part of the oration against Athenogenes.
But the most valuable discovery, from a palaeographical point of view, took place in the present century. In 1902 a papyrus roll containing the greater portion of the Persae, a lyrical composition of Timotheus of Miletus, was found at Abusir, near Memphis, and is now at Berlin. It is written in a large hand of a style which had hitherto been known from a document at Vienna entitled the “Curse of Artemisia,” and assigned to the early part of the 3rd century B.C.; and from one or two other insignificant scraps. The new papyrus, however, appears to be even older, and may certainly be placed in the later years of the 4th century B.C.: the most ancient extant literary MS. in the Greek tongue. The ascription of this papyrus to the 4th century B.C. has received confirmation from the welcome discovery, in 1906, at Elephantine, of a document (a marriage contract) of the year 311–310 B.C., which is written in the same style of book-hand characters (Aegypt. Urkunden d. kgl. Museen in Berlin, Elephantine Papyri, 1907). Of quite recent date also is the recovery of a considerable part of a commentary on the Thaetetus of Plato, written in a fine uncial hand of the 2nd century, now in Berlin. Considerable fragments also of the Paeans of Pindar of the 1st or 2nd century; a papyrus containing an historical work attributed to Theopompus or Cratippus, perhaps of the early 3rd century; a copy of Plato’s Symposium of the same period; and a portion of the Panegyricus of Isocrates, written in an uncial hand of the 2nd century, are printed in Part V. of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Further, many leaves of a papyrus codex containing fragments of four comedies of Menander were found in 1905 at Kom Ishkaou, the ancient Aphroditopolis. The recovery of so many great classical works within a few years may be accepted as an earnest of further finds of the same nature, now that excavations are being carried on systematically in Egypt.
From a study of the material thus placed at our disposal certain conclusions have been arrived at which satisfy us that the periodical changes which passed over the character of Greek writing as practised in Egypt coincide pretty nearly with the changes in the political administration of the country. The period of the rule of the Ptolemies from 323 to 30 B.C. has, in general, its own style of writing, which we recognize as the Ptolemaic; the period of Roman supremacy, beginning with the conquest of Augustus and ending with the reorganization of the empire by Diocletian in A.D. 284, is accompanied by a characteristic Roman hand; and with the change of administration which placed Egypt under the Byzantine division of the empire, and lasted down to the time of the Arab conquest in A.D. 640, there is a corresponding change to the Byzantine class of writing. These changes must obviously be attributed to the influence of the official handwritings of the time. A change of government naturally led to a change of the officials employed, and with the change of officials would naturally follow a change in the style of production of official documents. In illustration of this view, it is enough to call to mind the instances of such variations to be met with in the history of the palaeography of medieval Europe, due in the same way to political causes. It is interesting, too, to observe that in our own time the teaching in schools of a particular type of handwriting which finds favour in clerical examinations for the public service has not been without its influence on the general handwriting of the people.
Classifying, then, the writing of the papyri into the three groups—the Ptolemaic, the Roman, and the Byzantine—the next step is to determine, by a closer examination of the documents, the changes which characterize the several centuries traversed by those groups. In doing this, we cannot apply the exact terms which are employed in describing the MSS. of the middle ages. We have to do with writing which has not yet been cast into the formal literary moulds of the later times; and it has therefore been found necessary, as well as convenient, to divide the papyri simply into two series, representative of their contents and not of their style of production—namely literary papyri and non-literary papyri. Neither series, however, it is to be remembered, has a style of writing peculiar to itself. While the extant literary works are, as a rule, written with more or less formality, no doubt by professional scribes for the book-market, not a few of even the more valuable of them are copies in the ordinary cursive hands of the day. Conversely, while we find non-literary documents generally written in ordinary cursive hands, whether by official scribes or by private individuals, yet occasionally we meet with one produced in the formal style more proper to literary examples. Again, while applying to
