The Artifact: Wiping With Homer

In this episode of STBYM’s The Artifact, Joe discusses a couple of weird textual treasures recovered from an ancient garbage dump in Egypt.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
iHeart Radio. Hi, my name is Joe McCormick, and this
is the Artifact, a short form series from Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, focusing on particular objects, ideas, and moments
in time. You can learn a lot from looking at trash.

(00:25):
There's a city in Egypt on the western side of
the Nile Valley. Today it's called Albanasa, but during the
Roman period it was known as Oxyrynchus. Although lots of
people might not recognize the name, Oxyrynchus is without a doubt,
one of the most important sources of original, handwritten ancient

(00:46):
manuscripts in the entire world, and nearly all of these
manuscripts trace back to crusty pits where, for hundreds of years,
in layer upon layer, people through their trash. Usually, unless
they're carved into stone, written documents are relatively quick to decay,

(01:08):
but the dry conditions at Oxyrynchus kept these trash pits
largely protected from natural degradation and safely guarded. Thousands of
archaeologically precious papyrus documents across the ages. Beginning in the
eighteen nineties, a pair of British scholars named Bernard Grenfell
and Arthur Hunt led an effort to excavate the ancient

(01:29):
garbage dumps of Oxyrrincus and discovered a bonanza of written
documents from roughly the third century to the seventh, including
everything from the plays of Menander and poetry of Sappho
to passages from a non canonical early Christian work that
would later be identified as the Gospel of Thomas. It's
been estimated that about ten percent of the documents are literary,

(01:52):
meaning things like plays and poetry, with much of the
rest being the paper record of daily life, letters, contracts,
census rolls, receipts, lists of offerings for ritual sacrifice. The
garbage Library of Oxyrrincus offers a diverse and fascinating view
into life in Egypt through the Roman period and after.

(02:15):
And today I wanted to talk about a couple of
the papyri unearthed there that caught my attention. One sordid
document discovered at Oxyrrincus dates to the year two sixty
seven CE, and it has been described as one of
the world's earliest proofs of bribery in an athletic competition
known as Papyrus Oxyrincus fifty two O nine. It's a

(02:37):
contract between the ambitious father of a young wrestler named
n Cantonus and the trainers of another young wrestler named Demetrius,
stipulating that Demetrius must lose an upcoming wrestling match ton
Cantonus on purpose. If Demetrius fulfilled his promise to quote

(02:58):
fall three times and yield, n Cantonus's father would pay
him three thousand, eight hundred drachmas. According to several authors,
this was roughly the price of a donkey at the time,
but there's a heavy penalty for backing out. According to
a short piece in Archaeology Magazine by Jason Urbanus, in

(03:19):
the agreement also threatens that if Demetrius were to betray
the agreement and win the match, his party would owe
eighteen thousand drachmas, which by the earlier metric is about
four point seven donkeys, so a strong distincentive. Why would
so much wealth be on the line to fix a
wrestling match between two teenagers? Speaking to Owen Jaris for

(03:43):
article in Life Science, the translator of the papyrus, Dominic
Rathbone of King's College, London, explains the context in the
ancient world, the winners of athletic competitions would often be
given a cash reward or would be honored with a
life time pension from their hometown, but the competitions were

(04:03):
also winner take all. There was no such reward for
being a runner up. Add that to the fact that
entering an athletic competition was usually expensive in itself, since
you had to pay your trainers for their services as
well as for accommodations, food, and travel, you could easily
end up in debt. So if you had doubts about

(04:24):
your ability to win an upcoming competition, it made financial
sense to take the bribe and practice cafebe. Greek writers
from the period do speak about bribery and corruption in
athletic games, but this papyrus is the first to provide
direct proof. Rathbone also points out a quixotic aspect of
the contract, the fact that it exists at all. If

(04:48):
one side didn't honor the deal, who would enforce the contract.
It's an agreement to cheat, so it's hard to imagine
the contract being used in court to force one side
or the other there to honor their word. Another interesting
manuscript from Oxyrrincus caught my attention, not because of what
was written on it, but because of how it ended
up in the trash. According to Princeton professor Anna Marie

(05:12):
Liondike and her two thousand ten articles Sacred Scriptures as
Trash Biblical Papyri from Oxyrynchus, it's often hard to figure
out how or why a written text from the ancient
world ended up in a garbage dump, especially in the
case of religious literature, which you would assume was believed
to be holy. In some cases, books were discarded because

(05:35):
of natural wear and tear, possibly after the text they
contained had been freshly recopied onto new media. Other times,
generational changes in language or education level could make existing
books relatively useless. It's hard to get much out of
a book if you can't read it, but in some
very rare instances we can actually detect the final use

(05:56):
of a manuscript. This brings us to the Syncus Papyrus
number forty thirty three. In terms of contents, it's a
manuscript of an ancient commentary on the poetry of Homer,
which was immensely popular and widely studied throughout the ancient Mediterranean.
Liondyke explains that when these ancient papyri are excavated from

(06:18):
garbage dumps. They usually take the form of crumpled up
dry lumps, so before you can transcribe and translate the
writing on them, you have to flatten them out. To
do this, scholars apply moisture to the dried out fibers
of the papyrus and then pull and rub them until
they assume the correct shape. Some experts do this with

(06:39):
their fingers. To quote from lion Dyke regarding Papyrus three quote,
whether it was the vapors let loose when this homer
piece was dampened, or more substantial organic remains stuck to it,
the conservation of that papyrus must have been a surprisingly
unpleasant task for its editor. J. Spooner notes that this

(07:01):
text was last used as toilet paper, or what I
would call toilet papyrus. Liondyte notes that in most cases
the exact circumstances that led to the trashing of a
document are not quite so obvious, but it's a clear
reminder that even in an age when literature had to
be laboriously reproduced by hand, one copy at a time,

(07:23):
readers are always going to be facing their own priorities.
Tune into new editions of the Artifact every Wednesday, hosted
by either Robert or myself. As always, you can email
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

(07:53):
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