History of Discovery and research on PennUMus E16694.patr fragments
by Robert A. Kraft, UPenn 
(presented at the Oxford Patristics Conference, 23 Aug 1995)

These pieces are part of a miscellaneous collecton of papyri and related
materials acquired by the University of Pennsylvania Museum early this
century. 

They were first flattened and photographed by myself in April 1967 with 
the following notes:
  
Greek Codex fragments; very large book hand (Coptic traits?), in
dark brown ink with letters slanted to the right.

Subsequently a photo was sent to C. H. Roberts, who kindly returned
some notes on possible readings and the comment "I am by no means
sure that it is a Christian text" (dated 1 Apr 1968). As it turned 
out, his readings of frg 2 proved less useful than my own.

That's pretty much where matters stood until 7 Feb 1973, when I 
discovered another similar frg among other unmounted materials from
the same miscellaneous lot. Then, more than 20 years later it occurred
to me that a search of the TLG using a program that allows me to ignore
any blanks between words (on the IBYCUS System) would be appropriate,
and in June of 1994, I was able to identify the following two
patristic texts, but not all the frgs:

frg 1 recto (with fibers) is upper left corner, with margins preserved.
frg 1 verso (against fibers) is upper right corner, with margins.

frg 2 recto (+ frg 5) proved to be Chrysostom In Matt
frg 2 verso (+ frg 5) ditto

frg 3 recto has right margin, is Marcellus/Athanasius De Incarnatione
frg 3 verso has left margin, ditto

probably frgs 4 and 11 are part of the same page as frg 3

possibly frgs 6 and 19 are part of the Marcellus secton.

No identification for frg 1 and some smaller ones.

Unfortunately, Colin Roberts had not seen fit to comment on the possible
date of the hand -- pending closer computer examination, the frgs all 
seem to come from the same hand. My own relatively unsystematic probes
thus far suggest that the paleographical date range is wide, from 4th to
7th (or even 8th) centuries. To say "6th to 7th" does not narrow things
very much.

A physical description can be made with much more confidence. The 
Chrysostom pieces probably represent a page of about 33 lines, with
an average of 25-30 letters per line. There are probably some minor
textual variations, such as the absence of gar in two places.

The Marcellus (or is it Athanasius?) fragments are similarly formatted,
although possibly the page had as many as 36-37 lines, with about the
same number of letters per line as the Chrysostom pieces. Of course,
textual variants in the many missing lines could easily normalize the
respective page sizes. My suspicion is that they were basically the
same format, perhaps the same codex. The usual "nomina sacra" seem
to have been abbreviated in the usual manner for this period.

What is the remaining unidentified fragment? Are we dealing with a
large codex or series of patristic codices, or possibly with a more
modest book of excerpts of some sort? Your help is invited. 

How unusual is it to have such fragments on papyrus? Do we have other
evidence for these authors "traveling together," as it were? What is
this "Marcellus" text, and how is it associated with Athanasius?

As for the technological aspects of working with such materials, I intend
to make the digitized images available for wider inspection if the
University Museum will permit. My presentation to the Berlin Papyrological
Congress, dealing with some non-literary fragments at the University's
Center for Judaic Studies, illustrates how computer assisted maniputlation
of the images can aid in the research. 

//end//