for the 22nd International Congress on Papyrology, Florence ITALY 23-29 August 1998
The Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia PA) houses a small collection of about 150 papyri, most of which were acquired from a collector in 1920. Since these materials have nothing directly to do with Jewish Studies, they received little attention until 1994, when Jenni Sheridan and several of my graduate students made a preliminary inventory and prepared digitized images of the collection on Kodak CD-ROM to present to me on my 60th birthday. On a subsequent sabbatical, I was able to investigate the history of acquisition of the collection as well as to work through it with sufficient care to update the initial descriptive list. Documentary materials predominate (plus one small fragment of Homer), mostly in Greek (also Demotic, Coptic, Latin and Arabic), ranging from Ptolemaic to Byzantine times. This presentation will provide an overview of the acquisition and scope of the collection, as well as commenting on some of the more interesting pieces. //end of abstract//
In 1920, Dropsie College in Philadelphia -- actually a unique
institution for graduate studies in Jewish and related subjects -
- purchased for $100 some Hebrew manuscript fragments from the
recently widowed wife of a Dr. Camden Cobern
of Allegheny College
in western Pennsylvania, as part of a drive to enhance Dropsie's
growing collection of Jewish materials from the famous Cairo
Geniza. Along with the desired Geniza pieces, but virtually
unnoticed in the surviving records, came some "papyri" --
although there seems to be no information on how many or of what
sort. That Cobern would have had papyri in his collection should
occasion no surprise; he was the honorary regional secretary for
the Egyptian Exploration Society for a number of years, and had
visited Petrie at Gurob and Hawara in 1889/90, had been with
Petrie again briefly in 1897, and had dug Ibises and Jackals at
Abydos in 1912/13. Cobern's oft reprinted magnum opus on
Despite the fact that in 1925 Dropsie hired an experienced, if
somewhat eccentric, Austrian Jewish Egyptologist in the person of
Nathaniel Reich, there is no evidence that Reich ever
paid any
attention to the Cobern papyri. Possibly this was because those
papyri were mostly Greek, and Reich's specialty was Demotic; it
is also possible that tensions between Reich and Dropsie's
librarian Joseph Reider, who held the keys to the papyri and
himself worked with Greek materials, may have been a factor. In
any event, the papyri had no obvious relevance for "Jewish
studies" so they languished as an unnamed orphan group in the
Dropsie Geniza collection. Reich himself was offered three small
clumps of papyri cartonnage by a dealer in 1928, which he
purchased for $22 and presumably left to the Dropsie collection
when he died in 1943. There is no evidence that he did more than
a cursory description of these materials
in connection with their
purchase, although he does mention the presence of Demotic on at
least one of the clumps. He conjectures that all three remnants
may have once been joined, and he dates them to the first two
centuries of the common era. "It looks to me," he concludes,
"without having as yet studied them thoroughly, that the texts
are not of particularly great importance." As for separating off
the various layers of the cartonnage, Reich believed that "it
would not pay scientifically to take the trouble with this
particular object."
Most of these materials -- the Cobern papyri plus (some of) the
Reich pieces -- first emerged visibly into recorded history when
Dropsie had microfilms made
of their Geniza Collection in the
1960s. Then in 1982-84, with the help of a preservation grant
from the Pew Foundation, the entire Geniza collection including
the papyri were given professional treatment (and were
rephotographed in color) by a local Philadelphia company and the
smaller pieces were mounted/encased in mylar. This included a
Coptic codex in rather poor condition that was not mentioned or
photographed in the earlier records, and strangely did not
include "Reich Papyrus #1" (actually at least 3 layers) which may
have been stored separately from the Geniza materials and which
may or may not have been extracted from the aforementioned
purchase by Reich. It includes, indeed, one of the better
preserved Greek pieces, a Ptolemaic letter
(see below).
In 1992, David Goldenberg, former Dean of Dropsie and now
Associate Director of what had become transformed into the
Annenberg Research Institute and would soon become the Center for
Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote to Roger
Bagnall to see if a younger papyrologist might be available to
help inventory the collection. Bagnall mentioned this to Jenni
Sheridan, who was at that time teaching in Philadelphia.
Coincidentally, at around the same time my graduate students were
looking for an unusual way to honor my 60th birthday by
digitizing on CD-ROM and working on some local collection of
papyri. The two interests came together, and in 1994 I was
presented with a draft catalog and 3 CD-ROMs full of electronic
pictures of the collection (plus photographic prints as well, thanks
especially to the efforts of Alan Humm and Ken Banner) in
a successful surprise ceremony. This, of course, awakened in me
mildly proprietary feelings towards this CJS collection and I
spent part of my subsequent sabbatical pouring through the
records at CJS in an attempt to determine how these materials had
been acquired. You are experiencing some of the results of that
quest.
Jenni Sheridan and the students, coordinated by Kass Evans,
prepared a preliminary inventory of the collection and identified
74 Greek fragments plus a smattering of Demotic, Coptic, Latin
and Arabic (some Hebrew pieces had also been mounted with the papyri,
but have a different background) -- about 120 pieces in all.
In spring term of 1994,
Jenni also taught a small seminar on basic papyrology which I was
privileged to attend. The seminar participants worked in teams on
several of the CJS papyri, with varying results. With the help of
the TLG computer files, I was able to identify a small fragment
of Homer's Odyssey, but no other
literary pieces emerged. The
piece assigned in the seminar to Sigrid Peterson and myself
turned out to be a
Ptolemaic economic document from which, as
Sigrid suspected and I was able to confirm on my sabbatical,
there was at least one other fragment elsewhere in the
collection. Sigrid Peterson also identified one of the more
challenging fragments as
Latin, although we made little headway
in deciphering it with any confidence in detail. Other seminar
participants struggled with what appeared to be a selection of
contracts, letters, and the like -- the usual cross-section of
Greek documentary papyri -- highly fragmentary and often
seemingly illegible, but an excellent basis for learning
papyrology from the ground up!
During my 1995/96 sabbatical, I spent many happy hours attempting
to identify more joins between the actual fragments -- joins that
were virtually impossible to see from the photos, with their
different scales, hues, and lack of tactile textures. I enjoy
doing jigsaw puzzles. The CJS staff gave me virtually a free hand
to unmount the fragments from their mylar encasement when
appropriate, and to rejoin pieces that had become separated over
the years. In the process, I discovered that the preservation
experts who had treated and mounted the papyri in 1982-84 were
clearly not experienced in this type of material -- or perhaps
were in too much of a hurry at times. Not only was I frustrated
by being unable to work with the blank surfaces of fragments
inscribed on only one side, since the preservation people had
often attached such fragments to Japanese paper thus obscuring
the blank side, but I found numerous fragments that included two
or more adhering layers that needed further separation. In some
instances, the multi-layered pieces had also been mounted on
Japanese paper, and although that process should have been easily
reversible, in reality it was not.
I actually had a good deal of experience with separating and
flattening papyri, since I had worked on the larger, if equally
little known, collection of papyri at the University of
Pennsylvania Museum some 25 years earlier. So I set up a
laboratory of sorts, and went to work. Almost all of the papyri
that had been mounted on Japanese paper had to be unmounted -- a
rather delicate and time consuming task, but a rewarding one as
well. Liberal use of the xerox machine, and of a VCR camera
mounted to peer over my shoulder, assisted the job of step by
step recording of the process. There were some pleasant
surprises, such as the ability to recreate the position of the
previously mentioned Ptolemaic fragments before they had been
crudely wrenched apart, presumably in modern times, leaving
evidence of "mirror writing" from the face of one piece to the
face of another. Computer techniques are very helpful with
"mirror writing" and similar visual phenomena. There were also
some intriguingly frustrating situations, such as what initially
appeared to be
a single fragment of various "doodles" producing
some
19 separate pieces that had been glued together (I assume)
at some point in antiquity (I think), if not by a modern dealer
seeking to enhance the value of his mutilated goods. My concept
of cartonnage did not prepare me for such conglomerates, which I
propose to call
"collages."
The net result of the unmounting, rejoining, and remounting is
that the collection now numbers about 140 papyri pieces, some
of them smaller than a postage stamp, of which 80% or more are in
Greek. Although we are considerably behind the originally suggested
schedule for publication, the team (now including myself!) still
expects to produce a more refined inventory/catalog of these
materials
with full treatment of the most decipherable pieces. We have
permission to make the digitized images available on the InterNet
and will do so as the project develops into its final stages.
Here are some examples, as a sort of progress report.
Prepared July/August 1998 (last updated 13 August 1998)
Contents of the Collection
Homer fragment enlarged
Reich Papyrus #1a enlarged
other side of the same
the same enlarged
other side of the same
other side enlarged of the same
other side perpendicular of the same
other side of the same enlarged
check for paleographical parallels at Tebtunis and the Dionysios archive
Ptolemaic economic transaction
enlarged
soldier list: enlarged
number one with Demotic and Greek
number one enlarged
number one as separated to its components
number one components enlarged
number two with mostly Greek
number two enlarged
Latin fragment enlarged
Coptic fragment enlarged
Arabic fragment enlarged