Oxyrhynchus Papyri  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of manuscripts discovered by archaeologists including Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. The manuscripts date from the 1st to the 6th century AD. They include thousands of Greek and Latin documents, letters and literary works. They also include a few vellum manuscripts, and more recent Arabic manuscripts on paper (for example, the medieval P. Oxy. VI 1006).

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are currently housed in many institutions all over the world. A substantial number are housed in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University.

Although the initial hope of finding many of the lost literary works of antiquity at Oxyrhynchus was not realized, many important Greek texts were found at the site. These include poems of Pindar, fragments of Sappho and Alcaeus, along with larger pieces of Alcman, Ibycus, and Corinna.

There were also extensive remains of the Hypsipyle of Euripides, fragments of the comedies of Menander, and a large part of the Ichneutae of Sophocles. Also found were the oldest and most complete diagrams from Euclid's Elements. Another important find was the historical work known as the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, whose author is unknown but may be Ephorus or, as many currently think, Cratippus. A life of Euripides by Satyrus the Peripatetic was also unearthed, while an epitome of seven of the 107 lost books of Livy was the most important literary find in Latin.

The classical author who has most benefited from the finds at Oxyrhynchus is the Athenian playwright Menander (342–291 BC), whose comedies were very popular in Hellenistic times and whose works are frequently found in papyrus fragments. Menander's plays found in fragments at Oxyrhynchus include Misoumenos, Dis Exapaton, Epitrepontes, Karchedonios, Dyskolos and Kolax. The works found at Oxyrhynchus have greatly raised Menander's status among classicists and scholars of Greek theatre.

There is an on-line table of contents briefly listing the type of contents of each papyrus or fragment.

Homer

• Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 20 – Iliad II 730-828
• Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 21 – Iliad II 745-764

See also

• List of Egyptian papyri by date
• List of New Testament minuscules
• List of New Testament papyri
• List of New Testament uncials
• Novum Testamentum Graece
• Palaeography
• Papyrology
• POxy 413
• Tanakh at Qumran
• Textual criticism
• Zooniverse - Ancient Lives