The Papyri
In 1901, during the reign of Khedive Abbas Hilmy and the proconsular administration of Lord Cromer, some villagers in Kom Ishgaw were digging a well. Their Upper Egyptian village lay on the left (west) bank of the Nile, four hundred miles south of Alexandria, south of the sizable and half-Christian city of Assiut, north of what had been Shenoute's White Monastery at Sohag. As so often happens in Egypt when digging is done, they found not water but antiquities: in this case papyri, masses of them, the bundled tax archives of a city. Someone called the police, but before anyone in authority could arrive, many of the papyri had been burned by villagers anxious not to be caught with the goods.[3] The surviving papyri were dispersed through middlemen and dealers, most to find their way to the British Museum and the University of Heidelberg. The science of papyrology was young then, and no scholar had ever seen anything like these voluminous tax codices written in thin, elegant, almost minuscule hands. Bel1[4] in England and Becker[5] in Germany identified them as the records kept by Greek and Coptic scribes under the eighth-century Arab administration of a town called Aphrodito.[6]
[1] The earlier surveys of Dioscoriana, unsympathetic to say the least, by J. Maspero, "Un dernier poète grec de l'Egypte, Dioscore, fils d'Apollos," REG 24 (1911) 426–482 and H. I. Bell, "An Egyptian village in the age of Justinian," JHS 64 (1944) 21–36, have been superseded. For general treatments, see now J. G. Keenan, "The Aphrodite papyri and village life in Byzantine Egypt," BSAC 26 (1984) 51–63; and L. S. B. MacCoull, "Dioscorus and the dukes: aspects of Coptic Hellenism in the sixth century," BS/EB 14 (1988).
[2] The words are those of A. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger (Oxford 1983) 229.
[3] J. Quibell, "Kom Ishgaw," ASAE (1902) 85–88; Keenan, "The Aphrodite papyri," pp. 51–63. On how the "pipeline" has always worked, cf. J. M. Robinson, "The discovering and marketing of Coptic manuscripts," in The roots of Egyptian Christianity, ed. B. Pearson and J. Goehring (Philadelphia 1986) 2–25.
[4] H. I. Bell, "The Aphrodito papyri," JHS 28 (1908) 97–120.
[5] C. H. Becker, "Arabische Papyri des Aphroditofundes," Z.Assyriol. 20 (1906) 68–104; cf. idem, "Historische Studien über das Londoner Aphroditowerk," Der Islam 2 (1911) 359–371.
[6] The major publications are P.Lond. IV (1910) and P.Schott-Reinhardt (1906).
Four years later, in 1905, matters repeated themselves, again by sheer chance. During house-building operations in Kom Ishgaw, the mudbrick wall of an old house collapsed, revealing deep foundations that had covered over yet another massed find of papyri. The local grapevine alerted Gustave Lefebvre, the inspector of antiquities, who hurried to the spot.[7] A few acts of destruction similar to the earlier burning had taken place, but this time most of the papyri were dispersed to dealers, and thence worldwide from Imperial Russia to the American Midwest,[8] to libraries eager to participate in the new rebirth of Greek literature made possible by papyri. Among the papyri there was indeed a text of Menander;[9] but the body of the find consisted of the private and public papers of the sixth-century owner of that text, the lawyer and poet who would become known as Dioscorus of Aphrodito.[10]
The papyri that Lefebvre managed to keep from middlemen and traffickers he brought to the Museum at Cairo (then at Boulaq). He went back to Kom Ishgaw twice more, in 1906 and 1907, and succeeded in finding more sixth-century papyri on the site of the original find. A few had been bought by a M. Beaugé, of the railway inspectorate at Assiut. These documents also were brought safely to Cairo, and the whole lot was assigned to the editorship of Jean Maspero, a young classical scholar and son of the head of the Antiquities Service, Gaston Maspero. Before his death in battle in 1915, Jean Maspero managed to produce the three pioneering volumes of Papyrus grecs d'époque byzantine, of which the first was published in 1911. Together with Bell's 1917 edition of the sixth-century Aphrodito
[7] J. Maspero, "Etudes sur les papyrus d'Aphrodité," BIFAO 6 (1908) 75–120, 7 (1909) 47–102, 8 (1910) 97–152; cf. his preface to P.Cair.Masp. I (1911). Because the eighth-century papyri were the first from the site to become known, the form found in those later documents, "Aphrodito, " with a Greek omega, first found its way into the scholarly literature. As the sixth-century documents from the second find began to be read, the form "Aphrodites[*] kome[*] " from the earlier period came to be known. But although the form Aphrodito is, strictly speaking, a retro-usage from the Arab period, it is more common in writings about the site, and Dioscorus is universally known as "Dioscorus of Aphrodito." In one way it would be more accurate always to refer to the sixth-century city as Aphrodite, as some scholars do at present. But in this work I have kept the old familiar form.
[8] See G. Malz, Papyri of Dioscorus: publications and emendations," Studi Calderini-Paribeni 2 (Milan 1957) 345–356; add Hamburg, Vienna, the Vatican, and Ann Arbor to her list.
[9] Photoreproduction, L. Koenen et al., The Cairo codex of Menander (London 1978).
[10] The find made earlier (in 1902) thus contained material of later date (eighth century, as above, n. 7); the later find (in 1905, 1906, and 1907) contained material of earlier date (sixth century), namely, the Dioscorus papers. It is the material from the second Aphrodito find with which this book deals. No oldest inhabitant of Kom Ishgaw in the 1980s remembers from childhood anything his parents or grandparents might have related about the original findspots of the papyri; I was unable to trace either one.
papyri that had been acquired by the British Museum (P.Lond. V), and Vitelli's 1915 edition of those bought by the University of Florence (P.Flor. III), these texts constitute the bulk of what we know as the Dioscorus archive of sixth-century Aphrodito, the city that lay under Kom Ishgaw.
Our evidence for the life, work, and world of Dioscorus thus comes from one find (over time) from one place, in preservation widely dispersed, yet in intention forming a unity. The papers kept during a single human lifetime that spanned much of the sixth century reveal the background, activities, and interests of the person who chose to keep them. Numerous discoveries of Byzantine Egyptian remains at sites all along the Nile Valley, from the Fayum to Syene (Aswan), provide a perspective on the period broader than could be obtained from the archives of just one individual in one city. Most of these discoveries were made in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, when the political climate still allowed exploration in the field of what was once Christian Egypt. Dioscorus can thus be placed in the wider context of his land and his times, on the basis of evidence that, though for the most part long known,[11] remains underutilized. Because we meet him firsthand in his own words, the single figure of Dioscorus of Aphrodito as seen in and through his archive remains the most accessible introduction to the moeurs and the mentalités of sixth-century Egypt.
The paperwork surviving from Byzantine Aphrodito falls into numerous categories, both public and private. Of the public documents we have petitions, depositions before officials, proclamations and edicts (
[11] Papyri from clandestine native diggings at Kom Ishgaw in the late 1930s are just beginning to be known: see L. S. B. MacCoull, "Missing pieces of the Dioscorus archive," Eleventh BSC Abstracts (Toronto 1985) 30.
observed directly and in illuminating detail. At intervals over a period of six years, the present writer has worked at first hand with all of the Dioscorus papyri in Cairo.[12] After struggling with the difficult conditions, bad state of preservation, and frustrating logistics of this depot, one sees the realities of Dioscorus's world in an even sharper light.