ABSTRACT
The Introduction has provided a brief sketch of what I suppose to be involved in writing history, and particularly in writing history of the ancient world, taking account of broader currents of thought about the nature of the historical enterprise at the end of the twentieth century. We turn now to the other element of our subject, the papyri themselves. Understanding what papyri are, where they come from, and who used them in antiquity for what purpose is central to knowing how we can in our turn use those papyri that have survived in our search for understanding the ancient world. Indeed, the answers to such questions direct and limit our historical inquiries in ways both obvious and subtle. Much of the rest of this book is devoted to exploring such complexities. This chapter can, however, make no attempt to be a general manual of papyrology, nor even a précis of one. Such works exist and serve their purposes well; replacing them is not our purpose here.1 Rather, we will be concerned with the few specific questions mentioned above. This initial discussion will take in the broad geographical range encompassed by the surviving documents and place these questions in a general frame of reference. Chapter 2 then focuses in more detail on Egypt and on several aspects of the textual material that have a sharp and immediate impact on the existing documentation.
