The quest for libraries: mission impossible (2)
Clandestine discoveries: the sebbâkhîn disaster
Many literary papyri originate from clandestine finds made by sebâkh researchers - the fertilizing soil derived from the decomposition of organic detritus, of which ancient sites are so rich. From the hands of these sebbâkhîn to those of antiquities dealers to the dispersal of papyri in various modern papyrological collections, a few selected examples show how ancient books were able to pass through a long chain of intermediaries, how provenance data was lost or disguised for fear of the authorities, how textual ensembles have been butchered to increase the value of the units resold, and how literary texts and documentary texts - which are the only ones likely to provide precise contextual data - have often found themselves irretrievably uncoupled.
Despite the information that can be found by tracing the route by which the papyri arrived in a collection ( museum archaeology), or that provided by the material study of the manuscripts (paleographic and codicological characteristics), a clandestine discovery always casts a pall of uncertainty over the literary papyri that came from it.
Ancient excavations
Other literary papyri do come from real excavations, but most of them were collected before the advent of modern archaeology : this is notably the case of the Oxyrhynchos excavations. Conducted by two philologists, B. Grenfell and A. Hunt, these excavations yielded a phenomenal quantity of papyrus between 1897 and 1907, but the absence of any stratigraphic consideration means that, here too, the uncertainties and approximations associated with the reconstitution of the original holdings are inescapable.
More recent excavations
Finally, even in the case of more methodical excavations, assemblages likely to have come from ancient libraries are most often found in secondary contexts, notably ancient dumps where they were discarded and mixed. Between amputation and ancient contamination, the discovery of these assemblages reflects the disinterest of their owners and should not be over-interpreted.
