General Introduction

Grammateus is a tool designed to help papyrologists – and scholars working in fields related with papyrology – to gain a better grasp of the typology of Greek documentary papyri from Egypt. By typology, we mean the rules underlying the production of texts by scribes with various levels of competence.

When confronted with the task of producing a given document, a scribe did not proceed arbitrarily: on the contrary, he applied a routine that resulted from a tradition of scribal practice. The guidelines he followed could be more or less strict, depending on the type of document and its readership. He would choose the size of his sheet of papyrus, its orientation, and would write his text so as to convey the information in a straightforward fashion.

The rules followed by the scribe correspond to various types, that are determined not only by the contents, but also by a loose tradition that identified implicit strains: for example, a contract could borrow its layout from a general type corresponding to letters; or it could follow the general type of declarations, which is structurally different.

Such variations do not take place in a haphazard way. In most cases, it is possible to provide an explanation for them. This is – going beyond the mere description of phenomena – the purpose of typology. Types are not established once and for all. They evolve through time along with the changes made in the administrative system of Graeco-Roman Egypt. They may also vary depending on the area of Egypt where a given document was written.

This short overview of the corpus is complemented by a fuller description, Key Concepts.

In the long term, we aim to cover all document types found on Greek papyri from Egypt. At this stage, however, we have limited our corpus to examples from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, i.e. from the late fourth century BCE till the third century CE. A little more than sixty thousand Greek documentary papyri have been published so far, of which about three quarters belong to the time span we have selected. We have excluded literary and so-called paraliterary papyri (e.g. school exercises, religious and magical texts, medical and technical treatises etc.).

When examining a type, we first consider all items that seem to correspond to this type. We do not retain all cases, but select representative examples, following several criteria (none is exclusive):

In our display, all papyri are referenced through their Trismegistos (TM) numbers. We also provide the standard reference as generally recognized by papyrologists (e.g. TM 8983 = BGU 1 22).

The grammateus tool is linked to the database www.papyri.info, which allows the display of the text of most currently published Greek documentary papyri. Since our interface relies directly on the data provided by papyri.info in the xml format (open source), the display is always up-to-date, in real time, adapting to any changes made by papyri.info. For dating, we rely on the metadata found in HGV. The borrowed metadata are associated with our own, which we maintain in a series of matrices, freely available to all on request.

We start from the scribe’s task, not from established types. From this perspective, we identify four main tasks:

For the purposes of classification, we categorise each of these tasks as a Type, within which there can be a number of sub-types. These are the model documents: e.g. under the Type Epistolary Exchange, we refer to the Sub-types Private Letter, Official Letter, Cheirographon, etc. Further, some of these sub-types can have Variations: e.g. variations of the Private Letter are Letters of Recommendation, Condolence, etc.

In completing his task, the scribe has a number of options within each category. There are some Sub-types that appear under more than one Type: e.g. a receipt can be drawn up as a letter [Receipt] and also as an objective statement [Receipt] . We aim to describe each of these typological models by encompassing all aspects of the production of the document. The establishment of a basic classification enables us to map the relationships between the various document types and sub-types, and in some cases highlight an evolutionary link. The complete classification model can be seen here.

We have considered the following approaches to this database: