volumes present in a given collection. In several cases we see the specific
contents, which can vary from collections of basic classical authors to
highly specialized or professional collections, and we can make rough
guesses about the sizes of these collections. The evidence we have points,
as we would have expected, to a wide range of sizes and in general to
collections small by our standards.
- CONCENTRATIONS OF PAPYRI FOUND TOGETHER IN
PARTICULAR SITES
I turn now to our second kind of papyrological evidence, namely concentra-
tions of papyri found together in specific and identifiable archaeological sites.
Except for the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, all of the sites are in Egypt.
In general, these concentrations consist of hundreds or thousands of papyrus
fragments, ranging in size from just one or a few letters to several dozen more
or less complete columns of text, that were found together by excavators,
mostly in the early years of the twentieth century. The assumption is that
these concentrations were found together because in antiquity they were
thrown out together,
(^41) and that the papyri in any given concentration thus
originated in a single ancient book collection.^42 The most famous of these finds
were the ‘‘three great literary finds’’ made by Bernard Grenfell and Arthur
Hunt in the winter of 1905–1906.^43 It should be noted that it is by no means
easy to reconstruct exactly what was in these finds. The excavators did not
keep accurate records of precisely where they found things, and the reports
they published are frustratingly vague. Grenfell and Hunt themselves never
provided a complete list of the papyri in any of their great finds. They did
assign inventory numbers to the papyri they found, but many of those num-
bers have now been lost.^44 One consequence is that we cannot be sure we
can identify all the texts Grenfell and Hunt found in any one concentration,
- In a few cases, it should be noted, the fragments were found not in a dump, but in a
house: below, table 10.2, nos. 1, 2. Most, however, and all of those from Oxyrhynchus, were
found in trash dumps, commingled with all the other rubbish (much of it long since
decomposed) that ancient Egyptians might throw out. - If we do not assume they were thrown out together, we must assume that for some
reason various people, from various houses, all (by a rather remarkable coincidence) decided
to throw out literary texts at one time, and in one spot, in the dump. This seems a much less
likely scenario, and I believe it is more probable that someone was clearing texts, old or no
longer wanted, out of his library, and had them taken out together and thrown on the dump.
Support for the possibility of coherent collections being preserved in dumps comes from the
large numbers of similar bodies of documentary materials, in which specific names and dates
often prove that the papyri in the concentration belonged together and came from a single
original archive. A list of such archives is given in Montevecchi 1973, 248 61. - For further information on the excavations, both in general and specifically on the
second and third finds, see Turner 1982 and Houston 2007. - Jones 1999, 56 60, gives an excellent account of the records, both as Grenfell and
Hunt kept them, and as they are today.
Papyrological Evidence for Book Collections and Libraries 247