Princeton - PWB 030298 - Princeton puts papyri on Internet

Princeton Weekly Bulletin, March 2, 1998

Princeton puts papyri on Internet

A "descriptive inventory" of more than 1,000 ancient Egyptian papyri in the Library's Department of Rare Books and Special Collections is on the Internet as a result of a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (see www.princeton.edu/~dcskemer/papyri.html).

Papyrologist Rosalie Cook

In addition to a 243-page classified list, the computer inventory includes high-resolution images of papyri of Homer's Iliad, the New Testament "Epistle of St. James," and tax and census rolls from Philadelphia, Egypt. "If funding is renewed, the remainder of the papyri will be digitized," says Don Skemer, curator of manuscripts in Rare Books and manager of the project.

As Skemer describes it, Princeton's collection of papyri includes several largely complete Books of the Dead, the oldest dating to around 1000 B.C.E. There are significant literary papyri of Homer, Aristophanes, Demosthenes and other Greek authors read in Oxyrhynchus and the Fayum towns of Roman Egypt; and biblical and Early Christian fragments, including a previously unknown monastic letter of the third century. There are horoscopes, amulets, school exercises; official tax registers; and legal and business documents from the Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine periods in Egypt. Most of the papyri are in Greek, though there are a number in Demotic, Coptic, Latin and Arabic, as well as a dozen or so Pharaonic texts in hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts.

Brief history of acquisitions

Rosalie Cook "accomplished the principal work of the project," Skemer says, "correcting and updating old descriptions while identifying hundreds of previously uncatalogued Greek fragments never before catalogued." An Australian papyrologist, she was hired with NEH funds and completed her work at Princeton in January.

Conservator Ted Stanley

In addition to the descriptive catalog, the Internet inventory includes a brief history of Princeton's papyri. Most were acquired in the 1920s. Some were purchased by the University, but the majority (some 750 papyri) were first deposited by Robert Garrett, Class of 1897, for scholarly use and later donated with the rest of his manuscript collections in 1942. Smaller collections of papyri were received from other donors, including 50 papyri from John Scheide 1896 in the 1930s and about 40 from Edmund Kase '26, given in memory of Professor Allan Johnson in 1957. Others became part of the private collections of the Scheide Library, including 21 leaves of the Book of Ezekiel from a papyrus codex of the Old Testament and a Coptic parchment codex.

As part of the inventory project, all Princeton papyri are being conserved and remounted in the Preservation Office under the supervision of Special Collections conservator Ted Stanley.

The Princeton project is a component of a larger project being conducted by the Advanced Papyrological Information System consortium, which also includes Columbia University, Duke, Michigan, Yale, and the University of California, Berkeley.