ABSTRACT
The archaeological quest for the written word was paradigmatic in early Classical archaeology. This was no less true at Dura-Europos than any other site, and the search for parchments and papyri was one of the main objectives of the expedition conducted in the 1920s and 1930s by a joint team from Yale University and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters. Under the direction of Mikhail Rostovtzeff, then at Yale as Sterling Professor of Ancient History and Classical Archaeology, inscriptions and other writing from the site were highly prized by the excavators.
