ABSTRACT
This book is concerned with the theory and method of using a particular body of ancient documents, the papyri, in the writing of history. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss papyrus as a writing material, describe other materials that fulfilled a similar purpose and are usually classed with the papyri, and ask where papyri come from and what sorts of texts they contain. But before we turn even to such basic questions as those, a yet more fundamental and daunting subject lies before us: What does writing history mean? This question is all the more inescapable because, as we shall see time and again, the papyri are not a particular closed world, and we cannot responsibly write history using them in isolation from other types of evidence, models, and questions. Nor, for that matter, are most of the characteristics of the papyri unique to them. No other body of evidence has quite the same configuration of features, perhaps, but to a considerable degree the problems facing the historian in the papyri are similar to those presented by the documents from Cairo’s medieval Jewish community, preserved in the so-called “Cairo Geniza,” to give just one example.1
