A paper trail to ancient Egypt

At first sight, it's hard to believe that that papyri - the torn, tattered and yellowing-with-age texts from ancient Egypt - are of any interest. Put a classical scholar to work on them, though, and a treasure trove of information and insights into a society that existed a thousand or more years ago emerges.

"You start out with a bit of paper and suddenly it comes alive," observes Dr Brian McGing, professor of classics at TCD. "A whole world opens up which is very immediate and to which you can relate." McGing is one of a rare species - a papyrologist. He works on photographs of ancient texts, deciphering and translating them. "We use photographs because we can enlarge them. Sometimes you only get a scrap of text, words may be missing. The scribes wrote very quickly and often used non-standard abbreviations. They didn't separate their words or use punctuation so you have a continuous flow of script." McGing is working on TCD's papyri collection, which was acquired in the late nineteenth century. Until that time very few papyri had been discovered. "In the 1880s Egyptian farmers discovered that the soil found on ancient rubbish dumps made good fertiliser." As they dug, they discovered the papyri. European countries quickly involved themselves in digging for the precious documents. Grenfell and Hunt, sent out by the London-based Egypt Exploration Society, became leading papyrologists. "They discovered mountains of papyri in a place called Oxyrhynchus and began to edit them. So far, we have 65 volumes and they are still being produced," McGing notes. Egypt was Europe's main supplier of papyrus - writing paper - in ancient times. The texts survived in quantities in Egypt because of the dry conditions there. "It perishes when it gets wet," McGing comments. They provide detailed insights into life in ancient Egypt. "We have fantastic information on Egypt but relatively little from other areas of the Roman Empire." When the papyri first made their appearance, classical scholars were on tenterhooks. It was imagined that great new works of Greek literature would be discovered. Sadly, it was not to be. Most of the material relates to government administration, taxation and private affairs. There have been a few literary gems, however. "The work of Menandel, a Greek Comic dramatist, survives exclusively in papyrus," he says. "And there's a work of Aristotle on the constitution of the Athenians, which is very important."

McGing estimates that some 40,000 papyri texts have been published and as many again remain unpublished. TCD's collection is a small one, consisting of no more than several hundred documents. "But more interesting than the size of the collection is the quality of the information," he notes. The Trinity collection mostly came from Fayoum, an area southwest of Cairo. Provost Mahaffy and Gilbert Smyly worked on them at the turn of the century, publishing three volumes on the papyri of Flinders Petrie, a prominent archaeologist. The Roman texts in the collection, however, remained untouched until McGing began to work on them. Included in McGing's first volume of TCD papyri, published in 1995, are a number of literary texts including one by Homer. "Homer was writing around 700 BC, but the earliest surviving manuscripts are from 5 AD and 6 AD. Here we have papyri dating from the third and second centuries BC. It's an exciting stage and allows you to see how texts survived in the ancient world."

Among the collection is a private letter from a Roman soldier based in Egypt to his wife, asking her to join him. She was to bring various supplies including dates and pickled olives. "And bring with you all your belongings so you don't annoy me again, my lady," he wrote. "I sent you 40 drachmas and I paid 60 drachmas for your passage money. I was in a position to send you 100 drachmas, but I didn't. You, yourself know why I didn't."

The letter was probably written by a scribe, McGing believes. "A lot of them (private letters) are distant and fomulaic. That's partly as a result of someone dictating to a village scribe."

Ancient Egypt's taxation system is well documented. "We have a lot about the details of taxation in Greek Egypt and more so in Roman Egypt." The system was "enormously complicated. The most important tax was on land - in Egypt the land was fantastically fertile, since it was flooded by the Nile every mid-summer". There was no income tax, but the professions were taxed as were builders, weavers and prostitutes, for example. Even movement attracted a tax, he says.

IN Roman times, the main way you could right a wrong or register a complaint was via a petition. Many of these survive in the papyri. An unusual petition in the Trinity collection relates to bees. "Someone is complaining to an official that a neighbour has let his cattle into a field, which he has rented in order to allow his bees to feed on the flowers," McGing explains. "There were penalties for letting your animals into other people's fields and you get a lot of such complaints, but bees are unusual."

The life of a papyrologist can be an isolated one. McGing says he is the only one in Ireland. "You really only find papyrologists where there are collections of papyri," he notes. However, thanks to modern technology and to e-mail, in particular, McGing is now able to maintain close contact with colleagues abroad, who are also working with the oldest manuscripts in the world.