ABSTRACT
In chapter 1 we saw something of the range of surviving papyrus documentation from around the Mediterranean world and even northern Europe. Despite the progress of recent decades, the finds outside Egypt are still patchy, scattered enough that the density of information available in Egypt is simply not present. Later chapters will refer to this non-Egyptian material occasionally, but the historian working with papyri is usually of necessity driven to think about methods and materials largely in the Egyptian context. In the present chapter, then, we will focus on four key determinants of the information available to us from the Egyptian papyri and how they form the indispensable base for the more detailed studies on the use of evidence in chapters 3-5. These are languages and scripts, types of documents and their mode of production, survival of texts, and the use of damaged documents.
