The majority of unearthed papyri and ostraca lie unedited in libraries across the world, notably those in languages other than Greek, such as Coptic and Arabic. New papyrological editions can corroborate or falsify hypotheses based on evidence that was available earlier. In this blogpost, I will treat the influence of the passing of time on knowledge production, starting with a recent example of how new editions falsified a hypothesis.
In 1997, the papyrologist Bernhard Palme reconstructed the life and possessions of a certain Flavius Strategios Paneuphemos on the basis of the then available texts in the journal Chiron. This Strategios lived at the end of the sixth century and the beginning of the seventh. His vast possessions were found in at least three regions of Egypt; he was an important official; and he married into the influential Apion family by becoming the husband of the heiress Flavia Praeiecta – or that is what could have plausibly been the case in 1997.
In 2020, that same papyrologist adjusted his theory: instead of one Strategios, there must have been three. In his treatment of P. Messeri 44, he pointed out how new editions showed that Praeiecta’s husband had passed away in 595, whereas ‘his’ Flavius Strategios Paneuphemos lived on until at least 619. Because the bulk of documentation attesting this man came from the Fayum region, Palme suggested the documents from the Oxyrhynchite and Herakleopolite regions must pertain to a third Strategios. One date of death made three men out of one hypothetical person.
This case, in which a very good papyrologist has to correct his own hypothesis, is indicative for the caution that is required when one formulates hypotheses on the basis of papyrological evidence. Editing texts is a time-intensive undertaking and there are not a lot of people who are able to produce new editions, even less when it comes to Coptic and Arabic in comparison to Greek. Establishing matters of fact in this way is a lengthy process in which the temporariness of claims depends on a whole range of variables. Ways of dealing with this uncertainty have been put in writing by Roger Bagnall in Reading papyri, writing Ancient History, of which the second edition was published in 2019.
The passing of time does not only impact theories that are developed on the basis of papyrological evidence, but also the evidence itself. Text editions are always instantiations of ideas in vogue at the time of their publication, as well as circumscribed by the available material for comparison. With regard to the craft of making an edition, the options for supplementing letters and words to a fragmentary text on a damaged papyrus sheet expand with the growing number of edited texts. Local orthographic peculiarities and regional scribal traditions need to be attested before they can be considered during the reconstruction of texts.
Text editions as a whole, including the commentary, always bear the mark of the status quaestionis of themes to which these individual texts pertain, such as taxation or Roman governance. Most, if not all editions of late-antique texts that predate the 1970s reappraisal of the fourth to seventh centuries as a period of transformation rather than decline in some way or another are influenced by the then uncontested feudalisation narrative, either in its Marxist form or the more conservative ‘end of Empire’-line of thinking. This has resulted in a ‘negative’ interpretation of phenomena occurring in documents that were edited a long time ago without there being a clear sign of the assumed total decline of society in the texts themselves. Sometimes this negative appraisal of practices is reiterated in more recent literature, seemingly without the awareness that it bears the stamp of now-antiquated ideas about the Late Roman world. An example of this is the time clause of leases ‘without end’ we find in some contracts from this period. I have addressed several contracts containing this clause in my contribution to the Lived Time edited volume that will appear in 2027 or 2028.
Writing Ancient History on the basis of papyri is not an easy task. As texts keep being edited, no-one really knows what the future holds, except for maybe this: that which is unknown to us surpasses what we know. The historian’s interpretation of the evidence is always limited by that same evidence and with that, by the temporariness – in a way – of how ‘complete’, or rather, incomplete, the source base necessarily is. The future of our field is without a doubt full of fascinating new discoveries.