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1. E.g., Gronewald & Daniel 2004a, 2004b; West 2005; Obbink 2006. Introduction Institutional History from Egypt to Partial Publication The discipline of papyrology, where archaeology and philology jostle each other for attention, has had perhaps more than its share of serendipity. It offers an unparalleled source of new texts outside the main manuscript traditions for the literary scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity to analyze, and yet the ways in which it does so are haphazard, controlled as they are by the vagaries of preservation, discovery, and the market—as well as the ebbs and flows of scholarly interest. A discovery such as the Milan Posidippus, which has completely transformed the study of Hellenistic epigram, is rare and thrilling; the publication of the new Archilochus and the meticulous piecing together of the new Sappho, which have enriched the corpora of both these authors considerably, are equally so.1 Yet far more common, in papyrology collections worldwide, is the quiet repose of texts unpublished and underpublished, which nonetheless have the opportunity to make valuable contributions to our study of the ancient literature and its contexts—to say nothing of even larger corpora of documentary papyri. Such is the case with P.Mich. inv. 3498 and 3250a, b, and c, a set of Michigan papyri only partly published decades after they were acquired by the university’s Papyrus Collection. The history of the fragments is a checkered one, beginning in the Egyptian antiquities markets of the 1920s and cycling through various academic institutions before enjoying an oblivion that lasted for some decades. The provenance of the eighteen fragments that compose these texts is ultimately unknown, so their written history, at least, may properly be said to have begun when they came into the possession of 2. There are two candidates for this join: at the site of a repair (discussed infra), inv. 3498 was rejoined using a modern adhesive, while two pieces of adhesive tape link the fragments at a separate place. There are thus not two fragments (as archived) but three. 3. H. I. Bell report, July 16, 1925, box 2, Francis Willey Kelsey Papers (1894–1928), Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. 4. Merkelbach 1973a; Page 1974. 2 • new literary papyri from the michigan collection the celebrated Cairo antiquities dealer Maurice Nahman. From there, they were sold in two batches, the first in May 1925 and the second in November of the same year. The first batch of fragments was catalogued by H. I. Bell of the British Museum, who oversaw the distribution of the fragments in this lot to the consortium of scholarly institutions that eventually bought the papyri. One of these papyri—archived as two fragments that were subsequently joined2—came to the University of Michigan in October 1926 as the gift of Oscar Weber and Richard H. Webber of Detroit; it was originally catalogued as P.Mich. inv. 3499 but was later renumbered as inv. 3498. (The fragment formerly catalogued as inv. 3498 became, in turn, inv. 3499. To avoid confusion, we will refer henceforth to all of the fragments under their published numbers. The fragment under discussion here is the published inv. 3498.) This papyrus was part of a lot classified by Bell as “a great mass of material which in Nahman’s invoice appears under several headings.”3 The second batch, known as the Brummer lot, was bought in New York and sent to Michigan through W. L. Westermann of Columbia University. It contained the sixteen fragments of inv. 3250. The difficulty, of course, with a great mass of material is that it is so simple to give individual pieces short shrift. The first appearance of fragments 3250a, b, and c in Michigan’s acquisition records indicates that these pieces were not carefully read: they were labeled as Coptic instead of Greek. Even a cursory reading indicates that the identification was erroneous, but the reason for the mistake is simple enough; the hands are sloppy, the texts lacunose . They hardly looked the part of the distinguished Greek literary productions that scholars were still eagerly looking for in the trash heaps and mummy cartonnages of the Fayûm. At any rate, they were called Coptic in the acquisition records and retained this designation for many years. In the meantime, however, the papyrus from the Bell lot (purchased in May 1925) was published in two separate articles. Reinhold Merkelbach edited the recto, which he called a “Verzeichnis von Gedichtanfangen,” in 1973, and it was published...

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