Though papyri are already a feature of Pharaonic Egypt, papyrological material is more abundant for the Graeco-Roman period and has had an enormous impact on Ptolemaic research. Thousands of private and official papyri have come down to us, often bundled in archives; whereas individual texts are like instant snapshots, archives present a coherent sequence of pictures of a person or a family (Vandorpe 2009). Alongside papyrus, large amounts of potsherds (ostraca) and some wooden tablets were used as writing material; Ptolemaic potsherds, abundant and virtually free, were used for tax receipts or private memos but are limited to Upper Egypt. These documents were written either in Greek (the language of the administration) or in Demotic, a very cursive script derived ultimately from hieroglyphs. Greek papyri are the focus of Greek Papyrology (Rupprecht 1994) whereas Demotic papyri are studied as a subdiscipline of Egyptology (Depauw 1997). Both are quite technical disciplines, subdivided into a literary and a documentary branch on the basis of their characteristic script, vocabulary, and contents. Evidently, Greek papyrologists and demotists should collaborate, and historians should rely on both types of source in order to ‘‘appreciate the full complexity and dynamics of Ptolemaic Egypt’’ (Johnson 1987: 324), transcending the narrow confines of‘‘papyrological history’’ (Bagnall 1995; Manning 2009).
Thousands of papyri have been preserved, though they are unevenly distributed over the country since they only survive in dry conditions. Hence Alexandria, the
Delta, and many places in the Nile Valley have hardly produced any such documents. Most papyri have been discovered by legal or illegal excavators, among the latter sebakhin who dig out ancient town mounds in their quest for sebakh (fertile dust and debris). Papyri discovered illegally have been sold profitably on the antiquities market and turn up in collections all over the world. From the reign of Ptolemy II onwards there is an increase of official documents on papyrus, due to the new practice of recycling old papyri for mummy-cases made of cartonnage, a practice which disappeared after Augustus. Manufacturers of such papier mache bought up in bulk old documents from the administration, pasted two or three layers of papyri onto each other, and covered them with plaster to be painted.
This papyrological evidence, praised for its ‘‘innocent quality’’ (Van Minnen 2000: 32), is essential for our knowledge of daily life and socio-economic and institutional history, and its large quantity makes Egypt unique among the Hellenistic states. However, papyri are not the appropriate sources to reconstruct political history, and scholars have to rely on Greek and Roman historians like Diodoros, Plutarch, and Dio Cassius since the dynastic histories of the Ptolemies have almost completely disappeared (Ogden 2002: XXII-XXIII n. 20 and XIII-XIV). Nevertheless, papyri may furnish some additional information, as on the Blitzkrieg of Ptolemy III in Syria or the Great Inland Revolt.
World History
