A father's letter to his children, 246-222 BCE

Introduction

Somethings never change, no matter how far into the past you look.  Children (even adult children) need to be bailed out by their parents, and in turn, parents will send the needed support along with some "advice."  This familiar (pun intended) drama is how I interpret P. Lille 17 (also catalogued as P.Sob.3.100).

This papyrus, dating to 246-222 BCE, was preserved as cartonnage, and as such, is rather fragmented.  The name of the sender (presumably the recipients' father) is lost.  The middle lines of the letter are too fragmentary for me to venture a translation.  I originally translated the text found in the Logos module of the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, but in the course of my research, I found an more recent edition of the text with a different reading of the final lines.  In my translation, I have retained elements of both translations.

Translation

... to Aristarchos my son and Mikkala my daughter, greetings.  While Philon is carrying a letter concerning the bits of corn, I have removed for you eight artabas, which he leaves behind to Gorginios for my daughter; for Philon sails back to Alexandria.  Since you would like to work well, give him a token of your ... [4 fragmentary lines]; and the bits of corn are for one manger ... for you to have (?) dispatch to him a certain ..., so that the corn which is near you might be salvaged.

To Aristarchos

Textual Comments

An artaba was an Egyptian unit of measure for corn and wheat (akin to a bushel).
Gorginios is a male name yet is referred to as "my daughter."  The greek word for daughter can also mean a maidservant or slave.
συνβολον appears in this text instead of the standardized spelling of συμβολον.  The confusion of n/m sounds is common, and is a routine issue for the Hebrew/Aramaic transliterations in the Septuagint.

Additional Resources

One of my favourite things about my excursion into papyrology is the discovery of really neat online tools and resources.  Trismegistos allows for searches of people's names that occur in the papyri and will generate a list of the texts that attest to the name in your search.  Currently Trismegistos has close to 20,000 inscriptions and papyri in their database, so it is an incredibly useful and powerful resource.

What was my major anyway?

In high school, I was a total science nerd.  I figured why stop a good thing so I went to university to study science.  Like many science students, I mocked my friends that were doing their BAs.  I made the obligatory jokes about their glim employment prospects and derided their life-choices.  In hindsight, I was a bit of a jerk.  But by the middle of my third year, it was abundantly clear that physics would not play a large role in my future (which is not to say that I haven't taken anything away from physics -- for proof see my previous post).  The unthinkable had happened; I registered for some Arts electives... and I liked them.

Now undergraduate students are not, by and large, known for their unwavering dedication to lectures and coursework.  I was no exception especially when it came to physics.  Sometimes my mind would wonder during the lectures.  Sometimes I didn't even bother showing up to class.  On more than one occasion I even fell asleep (this is even worse than it sounds because the average enrolment of a physics class at UNB was 5-7 total students).  

On those days when I had a full night's sleep, but didn't feel in a physics-y mood, there was only one distraction I turned to -- not Facebook, not twitter, not even the proverbial comic book hidden in the textbook.  For me, Greek and Latin translation exercises were my guilty pleasure.  Only ancient language could scratch my itch and float my boat.

To this day, when I have some time on my hands, I crack open some Greek text and go to town.

Relativity, postmodernism, and the ancient world

As a university physics student, I learnt that the way in which we observe an experiment ultimately determines a large portion of the experiment's outcome (this is especially true of quantum and relativistic physics).  At first, this principle seems goofy, silly, and downright unrealistic.  But eventually, with enough professorial and mathematical encouragement, the unintended impact of observation became my established world-view.

Applying this trait of physics to the real world, I reason that since everyone perceives reality differently we will all have a different experience of reality.  And because we measure/understand reality based on our experiences, the whole concept of "reality" or "the real world" quickly dissolves into an infinite spectrum of realities that can only be grouped by their commonality.  Every individual "reality" being determined, at least in part, by the observer, his or her background, ideology, and personal history.

I am not the first to see the connection between Einsteinian physics and post-modernity.  The power of observation, which is what I understand post-modernism to be, drove notable physicist/mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, to turn to philosophy and theology after the collapse of Newtonian physics in the early 1900s.  Whitehead's book Religion in the Making is well worth the read for the way it tackles comparative religious study, and if I recall correctly, one of the first books of that academic discipline.

But what, I can hear you asking, is the connection with antiquity?

I was reminded of Einstein and the importance of one's perspective when I compared two books I am currently reading: Egypt After the Pharaohs 332 BC-AD 642, and The Last Pharaohs - Egypt Under the Ptolemies, 305-30.  The former views the Ptolemaic dynasty as a break from Egypt's pharaonic tradition while the latter sees them as a continuation of that tradition.  Both studies take into consideration the same histories, the same papyrological evidence, but their approach to the Ptolemaic kingdom differs, one from the shores of Greece and the other from the temple in Memphis.  They agree on the facts, but disagree about their interpretation and their meaning.

So, which study reflects the reality of Ptolemaic Egypt?  Well, that all depends on your perspective.

A bureaucrat begins to fall out of favour

This letter, P.Eleph.10, was found on the island of Elephantine, which was the site of a Jewish military garrison during the Persian rule of Egypt.  Even though it came to rest on Elephantine, the letter, and 31 others found with it, concerns the finances of the nome capital Edfu 100km to the north.  All 32 letters make up the Milon Archive, which is named after the final recipient and collector of the letters.  On the whole, the archive illustrates the tangled mess of the temple finances and the attempts to set it right.  All letters in this archive date between 225 and 222 BCE.

A fuller description of the Milon Archive can be found here.

In P.Eleph.10 Euphronius writes to Milon, his representative in Edfu, to make sure that the temple payroll is correctly recorded and passed out.  At the end of the letter, Euphronius instructs Milon to have the payroll checked by two men, one whose name is lost and the second, Andron, who is either a friend or brother to Milon.  Andron wrote a personal letter to Milon, P.Eleph.13, and I may tackle a translation later.

The only published translation of the Milon Archive seems to be in Edfu, an Egyptian Provincial Capital in the Ptolemaic Period, to which I couldn't find access, so my translation originates solely from my own devises.  Reader beware!

Euphronius to Milon, greetings.  As it were, you read my letter.  After you take the pay from the bankers in the temples into the temple of Apollo in the great city, and in like manner of the grain that had been delivered from those near the stores from the very first time until it had been put in place according to month and to year.  Then let him make an order for payment into which years he had paid, and carefully send this work concerning the successors off to us, that according to these things we may not be hindered to send down into the city the words of those who were remaining at hand; but the pay is through Th[...]os and Andron so that they check it.

Year 13.  Pauni 15.

To Milon

A Roman soldier's letter to his pregnant sister

Introduction

This letter, O.Flor. 14, was written by a Roman soldier stationed in Egypt at some point in the 2nd century CE.  It was written on a piece of ostracon (pottery) and is owned by the university of Florida.  You can view the full text in Greek here.

In case you are curious, about 28% of recovered documents from ancient Egypt were written on ostracon compared to 65% on papyrus.

The text is largely intact with only one small hole on line 13, which I will mark by "..." in my translation, and another hole at the conclusion, so I did not bother trying to translate the final couple of lines.

Notes

The text contains one Latin word transliterated into Greek, cibariator, which was a merchant boat.  In my translation, I attempted to Anglicise it.
A mation (plural matia) was an Egyptian unit of weight.

Translation

Maximus to Tinarsiegeta his sister, greetings and salutations through everything.  If you come into the days for you to give birth, write me so that I may come and preform your child-birth since I do not know your month.  I proscribed the favour of this to you, so that you may anticipate and write me to enter on the cibariators' ship, and when I stay with you, I will perform your child-birth.  For I offer to you that I will stay with you to give birth.  If you do not send for me, you will do me no gift.  I was going to send you containers for your child-birth; I did not send this favour so that when I come, I can carry two matia of gifts.  The man who carries ostracon to you rolls up ... to me.  Through him, do not be neglectful to write concerning the deposition against your house.  They spoke your name and they did not address.*  So formerly I wrote to your brother so that he may give your name sinesoeistas**.  We kindly welcome you, Kelleas, and all the men in the house according to your name.  Send me leaves as many as to fill a little bucket and I will make it ...

*The Greek of this line is uncertain.  Seriously.  I consulted a professional translation, and they only had an educated guess about a household census.
**Despite my best efforts, this word escapes me and my dictionaries.  In the Greek text, the word is without an accent, which usually indicates that the editor didn't know what it was either.

Comments

By the sounds of things, Maximus was not only a soldier but also a medical doctor and quite keen on presiding over his sister's pregnancy.  This would have been unusual because at that time, the practice was to have three midwives presiding over the labour not a male doctor.

"[C]ontainers for your child-birth" could also be translated "containers for your after-birth" which makes me feel weird, so I opted for the other version.  In searching the ancient medical texts, the Hippocratic writings and Soranus' work on childbirth, I couldn't find any direct references to "child-birth containers," but Soranus talks about needing several jars of olive oil to aid in the birthing process.  Perhaps this is what Maximus was referring to.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments on this text.  I'll try my best to answer any questions either in a comment or as a full post, if the question is juicy enough!

Confessions of an Esdras addict

It has been roughly four years since I walked into Dr. Glenn Wooden's office at Acadia Divinity College and asked him to suggest a topic for an MA thesis that would involve a Greek translation of an Old Testament book.  He responded "read 1 Esdras, and tell me what you think," and ever since that moment, I have been completely hooked.  Little did I know, even after my thesis on 1 Esdras was written and defended, I would still thinking, rethinking, and researching it.

What follows is a "brief" defence of my admiration and obsession of the old Greek version of the Ezra story.

If you grew up Protestant like me, don't feel bad if you've never heard of 1 Esdras... Luther wasn't a fan, so we don't have it in our version of the Bible.  It does appear in the Orthodox Bible and in the Catholic Bible as III Ezra.  The first century Jewish historian Josephus used 1 Esdras as a source, and it was widely quoted by many of the early church fathers.

Let's be honest; those guys quoted from a lot of books that I don't really care about.  But 1 Esdras is different.

The Basics

By and large, 1 Esdras follows the canonical book of Ezra with a few additions and omissions, begins with Josiah's passover (2 Chronicles 35-36), and leaves out any mention of Nehemiah and the rebuilding of Jerusalem.  The language of 1 Esdras is Greek although it was translated from a lost Hebrew/Aramaic original.  But since 1 Esdras isn't the exact same as Ezra, scholars have debated whether the lost original would represent an earlier or a later form of the Ezra story.

The Translation

There are some very interesting features to the Greek of 1 Esdras.  Besides the vocabulary which is largely distinct from that in the Septuagint, the translator chose to represent antiquated places and procedures with contemporary ones his readers would have understood.  For example, the Persian province of Beyond-The-River (Israel and Syria) was updated to the Ptolemaic province of Coele-Phoenicia and Syria.  Also, instead of Ezra gathering a crowd at the city gates to read the torah (the practice in ancient Israel), the translator changes it so Ezra gathers the crowd at the temple gates (the practice in ancient Egypt).

Why it is Interesting

Let me begin by saying why the Septuagint in general is interesting -- it is possibly the world's first EVER large scale translation.  That means that in some way, the choices and traditions established by those translators have been perpetuated for the last two millennia.  That's cool!

Because the translation method of 1 Esdras diverges from that of the Septuagint, there are some rather nifty conclusions to which one can leap.
1) "Literalness" in a translation has been a sign of reverence for the parent text, so maybe Ezra wasn't considered scripture at the time of translation (200BC give or take).
2) Perhaps 1 Esdras doesn't follow the translation method of the Septuagint because it was translated before the Septuagint.
3) Since the translator contemporizes the text, maybe his target audience was non-Jewish.

Those three conclusions might be a little far fetched, but a highly respected scholar of second temple Judaism, Lester Grabbe, sees 1 Esdras as a tradition separate from the "Biblical" Ezra.  Therefore, if nothing else, 1 Esdras recalls a time before the "canonization" or crystallization of the Old Testament.

And that is super cool.

To translate or not to translate, that is the question

We are all aware of what translating means, but sometimes during the translation process, words come up that need to be transliterated instead of translated.  Transliteration is the process of transforming the letters of a word from one language to another.  For the sake of this post, I will limit myself to examples of this to the Biblical text, but transliteration often occurs in other documents and situations as well.

There are many reasons why people decide to transliterate and here are a few:

1) The names of people and places, e.g. Adam, אדם, is a Hebrew word meaning "humankind."
2) Culturally specific titles and words, e.g. Herod is referred to as the tetrarch, τετρααρχουντος, a Greek word meaning "one in a group of four rulers" or a talent, ταλαντον, which was an ancient monetary unit.
3) Technical scientific/medical terms, e.g. Leper.
4) Terms of religious importance, e.g. amen, אמן/ἀμην, was a Hebrew word transliterated into Greek and then again into English originally meaning "so be it, truly."
5) Words that the translator doesn't know.  The best example probably comes from scholarly circles that  prefer "Qoheleth" as the speaker in Ecclesiastes rather than the typical English translation of "teacher/preacher."

Whatever the motivation for choosing to transliterate, the typical result is the loss of information/understanding for the new reader since the average reader is not equipped with a working knowledge of the original languages.  The insertion of a foreign word into a translated text can create a unique entity that either exceeds or limits the semantic range (range of meaning) of the original.

In the case of "amen," originally this word in Hebrew had three meanings/applications, however, in the modern English, "amen" is most commonly used as the concluding word for a prayer.  Thus, the transliteration has resulted in a limitation of the original semantic range.

Sometimes the effect decreases the reader's ability to appreciate poetic wordplay, as in the creation account of Genesis chapter 2.  God creates Adam, or humankind, out of the dust ("adamah" is dust in Hebrew).  Other times transliterations lend themselves to misreading and misinterpretation.

Case in point, the parable of the talents: Matthew 25:14-30.  While I can't speak for all of christendom, I have personally sat through too many sermons, devotionals, and motivational talks that turn this parable about money into a recruitment drive for using one's talents (i.e., musical ability, time) in service to the church.  This application seems reasonable largely due to the homophone "talent."

There are other drawbacks to the use of transliterations, but I won't continue to bore you.  Instead, I want to consider the other side of the coin.  With the potential downside of simple transliterations, why wouldn't one choose to always translate?

Even though translating a difficult/technical term would yield increased reader comprehension, the tradeoff comes with a loss in textual comprehension.  It would be easier for a typical reader to understand the title "king" because the title "tetrarch" is much less familiar.  Since a tetrarchy was a complex political reality in first century Palestine (the complexity was further compounded by the client-king relationship of the tetrarchs to Rome), the concept defies a simple English translation.

You can either have a text that is understandable or literal: translation or transliteration.  When you open a book or a Bible, which would you prefer?  The choice isn't always an easy one to make.


Note: Some of what I call "transliteration" may well be referred to as "loan words," words from another language that migrate into English via close contact from the original language.  Kayak, for example, is a native loan word for a specific type of boat.  The key difference in my argument is that a loan word from an ancient language does not achieve the same level of regular usage as a word like kayak; therefore, I am justified to consider them as transliterations.

Stay tuned for a post about understandable vs. literal translations.

A letter from 114 BC

In my last post, I gave my favourite anecdote about one papyri discovery in the ancient town of Tebtunis, so it seemed fitting to follow it with a translation of one of the Tebtunis papyri.

An explanation of the official naming scheme:

P.Tebt. 17 -- The first letter of the official name gives the type of material the document is on (P for papyrus, O for ostraca).  Next comes an abbreviation for either the place it was found, the individual or institution that first owned it, or the archive to which it belongs.  Finally is the numeric document number.

So, P.Tebt. 17 is the 17th papyrus found in Tebtunis.

An image of P.Tebt. 17 (accessed from papyri.info)

My translation:

Polemon to Menchis, greetings.  Since it has been determined that the manager come at daybreak on the 15th into Berenikis then on the 16th to pass by your kome into Theogonis, endeavour that all the things owing around your kome will be in order lest you detain him so you may not be thrown into further expenses.  Farewell.  Year 3 Pauni 11.

To the kome scribe, Menchis

Notes:

Berenikis and Theogonis are both towns in south eastern Egypt.
Pauni is the Egyptian month corresponding to May 26 - June 24.
"kome" was the smallest administrative unit in Ptolemaic Egypt, an unwalled village.
"manager" is left untranslated in the APIS Translation where it is simply rendered as "epimeletes".

Whenever I do a translation, I like to consult and compare my work with a more professional translation.  This time, along with one fairly hilarious misreading of the word δαπάνας as δα πάνας (a particle and the word for an Egyptian fish), my mind was turned to the question of translating versus transliterating.  For example, I decided to translate the word for "manager" but transliterated "kome" whereas the professional translation did just the opposite, translating "kome" as a village and transliterating "epimeletes".

In my next post, I want to discuss the possible reasons why certain words are transliterated instead of translated and the effect that choice can have on the reader.

When all else fails, hit something

Anecdotes are the icing on top of the cake of history.  Much like Oreo cookies, the best cakes have double icing, and the best histories have anecdotes about anecdotes.  While the Greek papyri themselves contain many anecdotes and little histories about the people of Ptolemaic Egypt, there are a few good anecdotes about the excavation of those same papyri.  The following story, taken from Turner's Greek Papyri: An Introduction and augmented by my imagination, is my favourite anecdote about the discovery of one cash of papyri.

In my last post, I mentioned how papyri were often reused as cartonnage in human and animal mummies.  Many surviving ancient works adress the human mummification process, but the knowledge of cartonnage being used in animal mummification had been lost to us moderns.  I say "had been lost" because that all changed during a winter excavation in 1900.

On January 16, 1900 Grenfell and Hunt led a dig in search of cartonnage papyri in the Ptolemaic cemeteries on the west side of the Fayyum.  One day, their team entered the ancient village Tebtynis (modern day Umm-el-Baragat).  In hopes of unearthing human mummies, the team determined the location of an ancient tomb.

Just imagine how excited (and relieved) those first on the scene would have been.  After years of tramping through Egyptian desert searching for papyri, they were able to calculate and predict the location of a Ptolemaic cemetery.

The first workman (I like to imagine Indiana Jones) makes his way down into the crypt.  At first everything is pitch black.  As his eyes adjust to the darkness, a host of millennia-old mummies slowly become visible.  But instead of human mummies tucked neatly in sarcophagi, there standing before him where the preserved remains of crocodiles!

Lifted to the heights of euphoria only to be brought crashing to earth by reality, this workman lashed out in a primal display of emotion, and smashed the nearest crocodile to pieces.  To his surprise, the mummified creature was stuffed with papyri like a librarian's piñata.

By the end of that year's excavations, Grenfell and Hunt had found papyri in about 2% of all mummified crocodiles, which goes to show that when you are at the end of your rope and all else fails, hit something.

There's something about papyri

If you are anything like me, you love used books because not only buying used normally equates to saving money, but also those books come with their very own personal history -- a name in the front cover, notes in the margins, and (if you are lucky) a small correspondance used as a bookmark.  There is something romantic about piecing together these types of clues to mentally reconstruct the book's previous owner.

I often think how a future mind might try to reconstruct my life based on the clues I leave in my books. In a way, owning used books and passing books along after you use them allows us, as mortals, to participate in the never ending pursuit of knowledge and truth.  Everybody, no matter how mundane or non-famous our lives are, has a chance to glimpse immortality in the reconstructed memory of a future generation.

I may be over romanticizing my point, but when you consider the Egyptian papyri, my feelings have a ring of truth.

Papyrus was the ancient equivalent of paper made from the husk of a Nile reed.  It was a major Egyptian export, in its day, and depending on the time period, not a cheap commodity.

After the Greek (Macedonian) conquest of Egypt, the country ran by means of a well organized, large scale bureaucracy that produced mountains of written record on papyrus.  So much papyrus, in fact, that they needed some creative ways to deal with the refuse.  There were garbage dumps of course, but as Captain Planet taught my generation, you shouldn't thrown something out it can be reused.

(Note, the existence of an ancient Egyptian manifestation of Captain Planet has yet to be discovered)

A lot of the old, used papyrus was reused.  The backside of tax receipts and country census documents were used for personal correspondance and for copying out literary works.  More inventive, however, was the use of old papyrus for cartonnage -- a sort of paper mache used in the mummification process and for post mortum stuffing of people and animals in preparation for burial.

Because of these extra uses for papyrus and Egypt's dry climate, a huge amount of documentation has survived well over 2,000 years.  Unlike intentionally preserved history, these papyri tell stories that no one intended to pass along.  These are the stories of everyday people.  People that were meant to be forgotten to time, but through a combination of coincidence and fate, come back to life for us in the 21st Century.

They tell timeless and familiar tales of the homesickness of young men in the midst of military service, of students getting bored and doodling during class, of disputes with noisy neighbours, and of religious faith being tested during hard life circumstances.

There's something about the papyri...



If you are interested in reading some of people in the Egyptian papyri, I recommend the book "Greeks in Ptolemaic Egypt" by Lewis.

How I became interested in the ancient world

Like many children growing up in a North American Protestant Church, often my Sunday School classes featured cartoons meant to inspire us with a dramatic presentation of biblical narratives.  The one I most remember, "The Greatest Adventure," told the story of two archaeologists and a young boy that get magically transported back to Bible times and become first hand witnesses to the great stories of scripture.  If you don't recall the series or have never seen it, here is a link to one episode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gPN9nyQ0-4.

While I loved (and still love) cartoons, even at a young age I was bothered by the fact that everyone in the past spoke English!  I knew instinctively that this wasn't the case, and it caused my mind to ponder the possibility of accidental time travel.  Would I be able to live in the distant past?  Could I adapt to the culture?  Could I even learn how to communicate and speak the language?

And so, at the age of 12-ish, I resolved to learn an ancient language out of fear of accidental, involuntary time travel.

In high school, I had my first opportunity to follow this resolve with the aid of my internet browser of choice -- Webcrawler.  I looked up a number of words and phrases in Latin, wrote them on large pieces of bristol board, and taped them to my bedroom walls.  Soon, however, I grew tired of learning disjointed words and phrases.  I wanted to learn the language not just a handle of "useful" phrases.

By grade 11, I petitioned the high school administration to grant me permission to teach myself Latin for credit... and it worked!  As it happened, there was a student teacher that majored in classics due to arrive and he was all too happy to guide a student through Wheelock's introductory Latin textbook.

As I discovered, however, the more you learn, the more you learn that you don't know.  Learning the beginning elements of Latin just made me realize that Latin as a world language would only get me so far in the case of accidental, involuntary time travel.

That is how it happened.  Almost twelve years later, and my hobby is still reading and researching the ancient world.