The XXXth Congrès international de papyrologie was held at the Collège de France from July 25 to 30 2022. The event brought together nearly four hundred papyrus researchers . A look back at this thirtieth edition with its organizer, Pr Jean-Luc Fournet, holder of the Written Culture in Late Antiquity and Byzantine Papyrology chair.
What is the International Papyrology Congress ?
Every major discipline has its congresses. These are great masses held every three years or so. The entire scientific community comes together and exchanges ideas in the form of papers and informal conversations. It's an extremely important moment, because we all get together to present both the discoveries we've made and the important projects we've started to develop. It's a snapshot of the discipline at a given moment.
Has France ever hosted such a congress ?
The previous congress in Paris was organized in 1949 by the great French papyrologist of the time, Pierre Jouguet, who died a few weeks before this one. It was a mournful congress that took place, struck by misfortune, whose proceedings were never published due to a lack of financial resources at the end of the war. The 2022 congress is therefore, in a way, a reparation.
It was only natural to hold it at the Collège de France, as it was one of the few establishments that could offer such good conditions for accommodating four hundred people, both in terms of venue and organization.And it was a great success !
Who took part in this thirtieth edition ?
Researchers from all over the world ! They spoke in English, German, French and Italian. The use of these languages corresponds to the countries with the strongest papyrological traditions.
These participants represented universities with their research teams or papyrus collections. Collections play an important role in the organization of our discipline. One of the great centers of papyrology is Oxford, thanks to its collection built up since the exploration of the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchos at the end of the 19th century, in which hundreds of thousands of papyri were discovered.
What were the contributions of the XXX Congress ?
Finds, of course, were presented, papyri out of the ordinary. In particular, letters by the philosopher Epicurus were identified by a colleague.
However, from a more methodological point of view, I have noticed a very clear trend towards taking into account the materiality of papyrus. For a very long time, we were interested in the text on the papyrus. Now, we're also concerned with the materiality of the support, since the text can be written on papyrus, pottery shards, wood, etc. The interest is also focused on the materiality of the support. We're also interested in the way the text is inscribed on this medium, the type of writing adopted. We realize that all these elements are significant, that they add to the content of the text.This is one of the great lessons of recent years ! In fact, it's a direction of research that I myself promoted several decades ago ; so I'm very pleased that papyrology has embarked on this path, which leads to a much more global vision of ancient texts.
Many projects involving new digital technologies or physico-chemical analyses were also presented. We heard papers on automatic image processing, digital paleography - the science of computer-assisted writing - and equally interesting papers on chemical analysis, particularly of inks. I believe that all these innovations are moving in the same promising direction.
