Understanding the written culture of the Ancients : the categories " documentaire " and " littéraire " in papyrology and their limits

Organizers: Jean-Luc Fournet and Antonio Ricciardetto.

Papyrology is defined as the science of texts written on transportable media, as opposed to epigraphy. It has organized itself into two branches corresponding to the two fundamental categories of sources on which it works, namely documentary papyri (" documents ") and literary papyri (" books " or " texts of a literary nature "). While this rather crude division can be explained by the specificity of the subjects dealt with in each branch, it does not do justice to the variety of writings that fall into one and the other, and prevents us from grasping the correlations between the two fields. Worse still, it has led to a compartmentalization that makes it impossible to consider the written culture of the Ancients as a whole. As E.G. Turner remarked in his famous introduction to papyrology (Greek Papyri. An Introduction,^2nd ed., Oxford 1980, p. vi), " the dichotomy of Greco-Roman Egyptian texts into literary and documentary papyri has put blinkers on our studies (...). There is not one type of paleography that applies to literature and another that applies to documents ". Galloping hyperspecialization has only reinforced this polarity, while recent decades have also seen the emergence of another category of papyri, known as " paraliterary " (or " subliterary ", " semi-literary ", or even " quasi-literary "), whose definition and contours are as blurred as the terminology used to designate it.

Using papyrology as a case study, the aim of this symposium is to examine the categorization of written culture in both the ancient and modern worlds. In particular, we will attempt to answer the following questions :

• How did the Ancients perceive and mentally organize the world of written culture ?
• What impact does their organization of written culture have on our own conceptions of it ? In other words, do modern categories correspond to the operational categories of the Ancients ?
• If they didn't exist in antiquity, are our modern categories nonetheless operational and fruitful ? Can they be considered epistemologically valid, or do they create obstacles ?
• In concrete terms, are there any methodological differences in the editing and exegesis of a literary papyrus or a document ?
• Is this categorization organized in the same way for media other than papyrus (for example, how do inscriptions fit into this worldview of the written word ?), and in periods and cultural areas other than Greco-Roman and Byzantine Egypt (Mesopotamian Civilization, Pharaonic Egypt, Byzantine world, Medieval West, Jewish world, Far East, etc.) ?