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A fact from Oxyrhynchus Papyri appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the
Did you know column on 22 May 2007. The text of the entry was as follows:
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The more accurately descriptive title here is List of Oxyrhyncus New Testament papyri, which describes what's been written. Such a title leaves open the poissibility of a List of Oxyrhynchus classical Greek papyri, which might be of interest to someone. Anyone object to the move? -- Wetman 14:17, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
This article currently is not about the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, but instead the New Testament Oxyrhynchus Papyri. The vast majority of the P. Oxy.'s are not NT manuscripts. The list, I believe, is completely redundant with the List of New Testament papyri. The P. Oxy.'s are identified in a specific color, and you can sort the table based on manuscript number, so it's easy to identify or group the P. Oxy.s from the other P.'s. As for Oxyrhynchus, that article is not about the town as much as it is about the manuscripts and the archaeological find. After these articles are merged, an article specifically about the town can be created (using content from these articles).- Andrew c 01:16, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
Woohoo! Got four of them from here. IV 658, XII 1464, XLI 2990, LVIII 3929. I'm not sure if this is where we get the word libel from. I think there's a good chance it is. I can feel a new article coming on! :D Alastair Haines 11:20, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
We all know that the majority of Oxyrhynchus manuscripts are not biblical, yet the focus of this article is clearly on the biblical. I have suggested in the past spinning this article off to something like Biblical Oxyrhynchus Papyri, but that suggest was rejected at the time. If we are going to keep this article about the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, then we need to greatly expand it. Quite a while ago, I worked up a table on the Homeric texts, see User:Andrew_c/test. Would someone care to look over that table and give comment on it (and if people like it, we can make whatever modifications and import it into this article). Then, if there is motivation, we can start working on expanding sections on other texts. What do other editors think is important to cover? I think Homer, for hopefully obvious reasons, is a good area to start, but what other topics and authors do you think are important to add to this page?- Andrew c [talk] 02:14, 17 November 2008 (UTC)
There have been numerous excavations at the site and papyri discovered at Oxyrhynchus have been published in various collections—in fact, many of these are fragments from the same ancient MSS to which P.Oxy. pieces belong. For example: P.Oxy. LXVIII 4654 derives from the same roll that yielded PSI inv. 2001. I intend to expand this page in the near future but, before I do, I would like to know peoples' opinions on this question: Is this article about papyri discovered at Oxyrhynchus or about the specific publication The Oxyrhynchus Papyri? P.Oxy.2354 ( talk) 15:30, 25 July 2010 (UTC)
Hello, I would be most grateful if someone could add details of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri held by the National Library of Wales, in the correct place, as there is currently no mention of them on this page. Thanks Jason.nlw ( talk) 11:45, 22 January 2016 (UTC)
I noticed that a great deal of recent work has been conducted on this article so I thought I would bring to attention the fact that this article incredibly narrowly focusses only on Bible-related papyri, in spite of the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri contain Greek writings completely unrelated to the Bible or early Christianity. For some reason, these works are only briefly mentioned in the lede and never discussed anywhere in the article itself, which focusses exclusively on Biblical manuscripts and documents related to the Bible. It is good that this information is in here, but the scope of this article needs to be broadened. For instance, it should at least discuss other works such as Sophocles's Ichneutae, and the many, many fragments of authors like Sappho and Menander, previously thought to have been lost forever, that were recovered amidst the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Also deserving of mention are the various non-literary works such as letters, wills, and various other miscellania recovered amongst the Papyri of Oxyrhynchus that have no literary value, but which reveal a considerable amount of information about daily life. -- Katolophyromai ( talk) 02:13, 30 April 2017 (UTC)
Great idea. Probably the best place to start would be with the outline itself. Does it make more sense to organize the content by language system, from earliest to latest?
Instead of 1. Theological Manuscripts ((Old Testament) (New Testament)) and 2. Homer - does it make more sense to use something like 1. Earliest Ancient Language, 2. Next Earliest Language . . . n.) Arabic (most recent language)?
The tables should also probably be moved to their own separate page(s) so that this top level introduction can be just that. Fb2ts ( talk) 11:24, 30 April 2017 (UTC)
Perhaps it would be appropriate to mention that Europe's oldest martial arts text (MS P.Oxy.III.466) comes from the Oxyrhynchus papyri? The Jade Knight ( talk) 21:27, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
There's a lot to digest. But it's also possible that - if we just plug in a more obviously inclusive framework -- people will engage and contribute. Have you seen these three (seemingly excellent) videos?
1.a. As the title of this article specifies Oxyrhynchus PAPYRI, I first of all propose that we redirect people who want a more general treatment to go to the main Oxyrhynchus entry - where we should also move references, in the first paragraph, to vellum and paper.
1.b. Grab statement regarding the lion's share of the papyri subject matter (90% administrative documents, NOT literature) from main entry and specify citation needed for now, even though I have heard it from the mouth of a recognized authority, it's on the Next Three Things list - unless someone else has it at the ready.
1.c. Reference to “Greek texts”, meaning Pindar, Sappho etc should be changed to something that doesn't imply that the Christian texts were in some language other than Greek. I propose "Pagan texts" - to include both Greek and Latin (Livy & Ovid, for instance) - as reflected in the proposed new outline (see below).
2. Change the headline now reading "Theological Manuscripts" to "Christian Manuscripts" as it implies that Pagan Manuscripts are not Theological, which is incorrect.
3. Change "Homer" headline to Pagan Manuscripts and move the 3 paragraphs in the summary statement about Pagan literature to that subheading (with separate subheadings for Greek and Latin (much later) literature.
4. Add a headline for Practical Manuals (?) - for texts like Euclid and the text.
The Order of Importance is thus proposed to be:
This, I believe, will be a good start.
Proposed new opening summary
Changes indicated in bold.
Main entry: Oxyrhynchus
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of manuscripts discovered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by archaeologists beginning with Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt (28°32′N 30°40′E, modern el-Bahnasa). The manuscripts date from the 1st century AD, when Egypt became part of the Roman economy to as late as the 7th century AD, when Egypt became part of the Islamic economy.
Although much of the early excitement was generated by literary works in both Greek and Latin, of the many thousands of papyri excavated from Oxyrhynchus, only an estimated 10% were literary {citation needed}. The lion’s share of the papyri found consist of public and private documents: codes, edicts, registers, official correspondence, census-returns, tax-assessments, petitions, court-records, sales, leases, wills, bills, accounts, inventories, horoscopes, and private letters.
Grenfell & Hunt originally sent their findings to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University, but Oxyrhynchus Papyri today are located in institutions all over the world. (Some work would be done here to verify where significant holdings are located and where ongoing research is currently unfolding - but failing that we can at least grab 3 or 4 locations from the tables detailing holdings of Christian texts.)
Fb2ts ( talk) 13:14, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Phew! Done. Thanks for all your help. It's just a first pass, but I think it's much easier to see what we have and what still needs to be built up. A first Next Step might be to highlight more of the important collections around the world.
ALSO: If you search for Oxyrhynchus in Wikipedia, you will find that a large number of entries have been generated for individually catalogued papyri (by their numbers). It seems like it might make sense to move the Christian Text tables to a similar Third Level format and concentrate on developing readable text for this Second Level format. That being said, I have not touched any of the Christian copy, except to change Theological Manuscripts to Christian Texts, as we discussed.
Maybe the number one most exciting thing to do next is to add a section, to immediately follow the introductory summary, on the open source deciphering projects that are now hitting the ground running. They're crowdsourcing the tasks and leveraging all kinds of breakthrough technologies. Some quarter million volunteers have been drafted for the effort. How could they not be tempted to turn to Wikipedia for more information? If we play our cards right, this entry could really take off! Fb2ts ( talk) 14:01, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
What do you think? Are "perhaps the most shocking" and "most benefited" a bit hyperbolic for a wikipedia entry?
ALSO: did you mean to suggest that Livy is NOT literary? For that matter, I know I left that little preamble under Pagan Texts - but the Bible is certainly an important literary work. Perhaps that paragraph should go somewhere in the summary, and it might then make sense also to change "Pagan Texts" to "Pagan Literature" and "Christian Texts" to "Christian Literature" Fb2ts ( talk) 14:50, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
Wow! This entry is really shaping up. Nice work. What do you think of the idea of using more succinct subtitles, e.g., Drama, History, Math & Poetry?
Re: Drama
Re: History
It's so great that you know so much about this stuff. Thanks for sharing. Fb2ts ( talk) 16:39, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
I'm thinking of starting a Manuscripts WikiProject. Would you be interested in such a thing? The first step is apparently to go to the talk pages of all the articles linked to the Manuscripts category page (and it's various subcategory pages), and encourage people to add their name to the as yet unlaunched WikiProject list. I'd officially propose the WikiProject first, of course.
It's clearly a lot of work. But we wouldn't have to be in a hurry. And Wikipedia probably has a great group of editors, and editor wannabes, in search of each other!
ALSO: how could there not be a Paleaographer page? That's ridiculous!
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Oxyrhynchus Papyri article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
A fact from Oxyrhynchus Papyri appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the
Did you know column on 22 May 2007. The text of the entry was as follows:
|
The more accurately descriptive title here is List of Oxyrhyncus New Testament papyri, which describes what's been written. Such a title leaves open the poissibility of a List of Oxyrhynchus classical Greek papyri, which might be of interest to someone. Anyone object to the move? -- Wetman 14:17, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
This article currently is not about the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, but instead the New Testament Oxyrhynchus Papyri. The vast majority of the P. Oxy.'s are not NT manuscripts. The list, I believe, is completely redundant with the List of New Testament papyri. The P. Oxy.'s are identified in a specific color, and you can sort the table based on manuscript number, so it's easy to identify or group the P. Oxy.s from the other P.'s. As for Oxyrhynchus, that article is not about the town as much as it is about the manuscripts and the archaeological find. After these articles are merged, an article specifically about the town can be created (using content from these articles).- Andrew c 01:16, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
Woohoo! Got four of them from here. IV 658, XII 1464, XLI 2990, LVIII 3929. I'm not sure if this is where we get the word libel from. I think there's a good chance it is. I can feel a new article coming on! :D Alastair Haines 11:20, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
We all know that the majority of Oxyrhynchus manuscripts are not biblical, yet the focus of this article is clearly on the biblical. I have suggested in the past spinning this article off to something like Biblical Oxyrhynchus Papyri, but that suggest was rejected at the time. If we are going to keep this article about the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, then we need to greatly expand it. Quite a while ago, I worked up a table on the Homeric texts, see User:Andrew_c/test. Would someone care to look over that table and give comment on it (and if people like it, we can make whatever modifications and import it into this article). Then, if there is motivation, we can start working on expanding sections on other texts. What do other editors think is important to cover? I think Homer, for hopefully obvious reasons, is a good area to start, but what other topics and authors do you think are important to add to this page?- Andrew c [talk] 02:14, 17 November 2008 (UTC)
There have been numerous excavations at the site and papyri discovered at Oxyrhynchus have been published in various collections—in fact, many of these are fragments from the same ancient MSS to which P.Oxy. pieces belong. For example: P.Oxy. LXVIII 4654 derives from the same roll that yielded PSI inv. 2001. I intend to expand this page in the near future but, before I do, I would like to know peoples' opinions on this question: Is this article about papyri discovered at Oxyrhynchus or about the specific publication The Oxyrhynchus Papyri? P.Oxy.2354 ( talk) 15:30, 25 July 2010 (UTC)
Hello, I would be most grateful if someone could add details of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri held by the National Library of Wales, in the correct place, as there is currently no mention of them on this page. Thanks Jason.nlw ( talk) 11:45, 22 January 2016 (UTC)
I noticed that a great deal of recent work has been conducted on this article so I thought I would bring to attention the fact that this article incredibly narrowly focusses only on Bible-related papyri, in spite of the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri contain Greek writings completely unrelated to the Bible or early Christianity. For some reason, these works are only briefly mentioned in the lede and never discussed anywhere in the article itself, which focusses exclusively on Biblical manuscripts and documents related to the Bible. It is good that this information is in here, but the scope of this article needs to be broadened. For instance, it should at least discuss other works such as Sophocles's Ichneutae, and the many, many fragments of authors like Sappho and Menander, previously thought to have been lost forever, that were recovered amidst the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Also deserving of mention are the various non-literary works such as letters, wills, and various other miscellania recovered amongst the Papyri of Oxyrhynchus that have no literary value, but which reveal a considerable amount of information about daily life. -- Katolophyromai ( talk) 02:13, 30 April 2017 (UTC)
Great idea. Probably the best place to start would be with the outline itself. Does it make more sense to organize the content by language system, from earliest to latest?
Instead of 1. Theological Manuscripts ((Old Testament) (New Testament)) and 2. Homer - does it make more sense to use something like 1. Earliest Ancient Language, 2. Next Earliest Language . . . n.) Arabic (most recent language)?
The tables should also probably be moved to their own separate page(s) so that this top level introduction can be just that. Fb2ts ( talk) 11:24, 30 April 2017 (UTC)
Perhaps it would be appropriate to mention that Europe's oldest martial arts text (MS P.Oxy.III.466) comes from the Oxyrhynchus papyri? The Jade Knight ( talk) 21:27, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
There's a lot to digest. But it's also possible that - if we just plug in a more obviously inclusive framework -- people will engage and contribute. Have you seen these three (seemingly excellent) videos?
1.a. As the title of this article specifies Oxyrhynchus PAPYRI, I first of all propose that we redirect people who want a more general treatment to go to the main Oxyrhynchus entry - where we should also move references, in the first paragraph, to vellum and paper.
1.b. Grab statement regarding the lion's share of the papyri subject matter (90% administrative documents, NOT literature) from main entry and specify citation needed for now, even though I have heard it from the mouth of a recognized authority, it's on the Next Three Things list - unless someone else has it at the ready.
1.c. Reference to “Greek texts”, meaning Pindar, Sappho etc should be changed to something that doesn't imply that the Christian texts were in some language other than Greek. I propose "Pagan texts" - to include both Greek and Latin (Livy & Ovid, for instance) - as reflected in the proposed new outline (see below).
2. Change the headline now reading "Theological Manuscripts" to "Christian Manuscripts" as it implies that Pagan Manuscripts are not Theological, which is incorrect.
3. Change "Homer" headline to Pagan Manuscripts and move the 3 paragraphs in the summary statement about Pagan literature to that subheading (with separate subheadings for Greek and Latin (much later) literature.
4. Add a headline for Practical Manuals (?) - for texts like Euclid and the text.
The Order of Importance is thus proposed to be:
This, I believe, will be a good start.
Proposed new opening summary
Changes indicated in bold.
Main entry: Oxyrhynchus
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of manuscripts discovered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by archaeologists beginning with Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt (28°32′N 30°40′E, modern el-Bahnasa). The manuscripts date from the 1st century AD, when Egypt became part of the Roman economy to as late as the 7th century AD, when Egypt became part of the Islamic economy.
Although much of the early excitement was generated by literary works in both Greek and Latin, of the many thousands of papyri excavated from Oxyrhynchus, only an estimated 10% were literary {citation needed}. The lion’s share of the papyri found consist of public and private documents: codes, edicts, registers, official correspondence, census-returns, tax-assessments, petitions, court-records, sales, leases, wills, bills, accounts, inventories, horoscopes, and private letters.
Grenfell & Hunt originally sent their findings to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University, but Oxyrhynchus Papyri today are located in institutions all over the world. (Some work would be done here to verify where significant holdings are located and where ongoing research is currently unfolding - but failing that we can at least grab 3 or 4 locations from the tables detailing holdings of Christian texts.)
Fb2ts ( talk) 13:14, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Phew! Done. Thanks for all your help. It's just a first pass, but I think it's much easier to see what we have and what still needs to be built up. A first Next Step might be to highlight more of the important collections around the world.
ALSO: If you search for Oxyrhynchus in Wikipedia, you will find that a large number of entries have been generated for individually catalogued papyri (by their numbers). It seems like it might make sense to move the Christian Text tables to a similar Third Level format and concentrate on developing readable text for this Second Level format. That being said, I have not touched any of the Christian copy, except to change Theological Manuscripts to Christian Texts, as we discussed.
Maybe the number one most exciting thing to do next is to add a section, to immediately follow the introductory summary, on the open source deciphering projects that are now hitting the ground running. They're crowdsourcing the tasks and leveraging all kinds of breakthrough technologies. Some quarter million volunteers have been drafted for the effort. How could they not be tempted to turn to Wikipedia for more information? If we play our cards right, this entry could really take off! Fb2ts ( talk) 14:01, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
What do you think? Are "perhaps the most shocking" and "most benefited" a bit hyperbolic for a wikipedia entry?
ALSO: did you mean to suggest that Livy is NOT literary? For that matter, I know I left that little preamble under Pagan Texts - but the Bible is certainly an important literary work. Perhaps that paragraph should go somewhere in the summary, and it might then make sense also to change "Pagan Texts" to "Pagan Literature" and "Christian Texts" to "Christian Literature" Fb2ts ( talk) 14:50, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
Wow! This entry is really shaping up. Nice work. What do you think of the idea of using more succinct subtitles, e.g., Drama, History, Math & Poetry?
Re: Drama
Re: History
It's so great that you know so much about this stuff. Thanks for sharing. Fb2ts ( talk) 16:39, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
I'm thinking of starting a Manuscripts WikiProject. Would you be interested in such a thing? The first step is apparently to go to the talk pages of all the articles linked to the Manuscripts category page (and it's various subcategory pages), and encourage people to add their name to the as yet unlaunched WikiProject list. I'd officially propose the WikiProject first, of course.
It's clearly a lot of work. But we wouldn't have to be in a hurry. And Wikipedia probably has a great group of editors, and editor wannabes, in search of each other!
ALSO: how could there not be a Paleaographer page? That's ridiculous!