ABSTRACT
It will be evident from the varied circumstances in which papyri have survived and been edited that they reach the scholar and student with a great diversity of immediate contexts. At one extreme, a papyrus may be acquired in isolation through the antiquities market, with no associated information about where it was found or with what other texts. At the other, a papyrus may be found as part of a group in a controlled excavation or at least be identifiable as a member of an assemblage of papyri. (Papyrologists often refer to such assemblages loosely as “archives,” not necessarily meaning to ascribe to them either an official capacity or even any ancient physical unity.1)
The task of the historian in using papyri is clearly conditioned to a large extent by these circumstances. In an extreme case the author and recipient of a text may be unknown, and the conditions under which it was drawn up a matter of conjecture. Or all of the persons may be well known, along with their family connections, material circumstances, and the context of writing. These differing cases impose different tasks on the historian. The purpose of this chapter is to show several instances of the scholar’s response to the challenge offered by a papyrus or group of papyri. In the first section we will look at two papyri lacking an obvious context, from which historians have managed to extract a great deal; the first of these is in fact close to the first of the extremes described above. With them I discuss a text forming part of an archive but the subject of important study from a viewpoint outside that archive and a foray into massive tax rolls for a purpose very different from the usual. A second section will consider various ways in which clusters or assemblages of documents allow rich and informative analysis. The third section will speak briefly-because the question will occupy us again in various forms in later chapters-of the process of synthesizing scattered bits of information; in the fourth we will look at the ways in which absent papyrological information can be replaced by other types of evidence.
