Milan Papyrus
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The Milan Papyrus is a papyrus scroll written in the late 3rd century BC during the rule of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Alexandria. Originally discovered by anonymous tomb raiders as part of a mummy wrapping, it was purchased in the papyrus "gray market" in Europe in the late 1990s by the University of Milan. Over six hundred previously unknown lines of Greek poetry are on the scroll, representing about 112 brief poems, or epigrams. Two of these were already known and had been attributed by the 12th century Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes to the Hellenistic epigrammatist Posidippus of Pella, a Macedonian who spent his literary career in Alexandria. The initial reaction has been to attribute all the new lines to Posidippus, though Franco Ferrari (link) suggests that there is evidence the manuscript is an anthology, in which Posidippus' epigrams predominated.
As the earliest surviving example of a Greek poetry book as well as the largest addition to the corpus of classical Greek poetry in many years, the tale of the discovery made The New York Times and National Geographic [1] (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/10/1028_021028_mummyscroll.html).
Labelled the "Milan papyrus" it was published in a scholarly edition in 2001, edited by Guido Bastianini, Claudio Gallazzi and Colin Austin. In 2002 Austin and Bastianini published a more popular edition of "all the surviving works of Posidippus", including the epigrams of the papyrus, with Italian and English translations. Scholars have rushed to mine this new trove of highly-conscious productions at the most sophisticated level that were created in a major center of Hellenistic culture. In October 2002, the University of Cincinnati hosted a symposium on the Milian Papyrus [2] (http://www.uc.edu/news/posid.htm).
External links
- David Petrain, "Introduction to Posidippus" (http://www.chs.harvard.edu/classicsat/issue_1/posidippus_intro.html)
- issue_1/z_classat_pdf/ferrari.pdf Franco Ferrari, "Posidippus, the Milan Papyrus and some Hellenistic anthologies" (http://www.chs.harvard.edu/classicsat/)Template:Egypt-stub