From Alexandria to Babylon: Near Eastern Languages and Hellenistic Erudition in the Oxyrhrynchus Glossary (P.Oxy. 1802 + 4812) (review)

This extraordinarily learned little book makes available for the first time the complete surviving text of a unique fragment of ancient Greek scholarship. The Oxyrhynchus Glossary, composed probably in the first century a.d. (though the papyrus copy on which it was found comes from the second century), is the remains of a collection of interesting words taken from antiquarian, historical, and ethnographic texts, with explicit references to and quotations from those texts. The range of sources used shows that the glossary must have been compiled in one of the ancient world’s best libraries, probably the one at Alexandria; it is a precious fragment of evidence as to what Alexandrian scholarship was like before it suffered the process of abbreviation and stripping out of references and quotations that intervened between the composition of most such scholarly works and the form in which we have them. Unusually for ancient Greek scholarship, the words treated in this glossary are not taken from poetry or other classical literature; rather they come from nonliterary sources and consist primarily of dialectal and foreign words. The glossary is the earliest known text to list words in full alphabetical order (i.e., an order that takes into account all the letters in the words); most ancient lexica were either arranged topically or, if they employed alphabetical order, ordered words only by their first letter or two.

Schironi makes a convincing case that the glossary is a fragment either of the massive lexicon of Pamphilus or of a work based on that lexicon. As Pamphilius’ lexicon (composed in the first century a.d. and now lost) was the main source of Diogenianus’ lexicon (composed in the second century a.d. and now lost), which in turn was the main source of Hesychius’ lexicon (composed in the fifth or sixth century a.d. and still extant, though not in its original form), comparison of entries in the Oxyrhynchus Glossary with the equivalent entries in Hesychius offers a precious glimpse into the development of the most important surviving ancient Greek lexicon.

This book provides a complete, corrected text of the surviving fragments of the Oxyrhynchus Glossary with translation, commentary, and extensive yet accessible discussion. The text itself is not new: the largest fragments of the glossary were first published in 1922 as P.Oxy. 1802, and numerous smaller fragments were later identified and published by Schironi herself in 2007 as P.Oxy. 4812. (It is alarming to learn that three of the fragments—including one from the 2007 group—had been lost by the time Schironi was preparing this reedition.) The edition is nevertheless important, both because it offers a corrected text and because it brings all the fragments of this glossary together for the first time. The translation and detailed commentary are very helpful in making sense of the work, which is difficult to understand both because of its fragmentary nature and because of the obscurity of the original text. Schironi’s rare combination of skills is impressively displayed: the discussion shifts repeatedly between palaeographical points, linguistic matters involving not only a large number of Greek dialects but also Persian, Aramaic, Akkadian, Albanian, and other languages, a variety of ancient writing systems, lost works of obscure Greek authors on a wide range of topics, and the details of Hellenistic scholarly methods. The argument is nevertheless nearly always clear and accessible to those without such skills, and jargon is avoided to a remarkable extent. The book also has a lengthy introduction and shorter conclusion, which provide a valuable study of the glossary, its origins and authorship, and its significance for our understanding of Hellenistic scholarship.

The book is generally well produced, with few errors and with a helpful appendix of plates with photographs of all the surviving fragments (though it would...