Now Available Online – Poetry as Initiation: The Center for Hellenic Studies Symposium on the Derveni Papyrus

Now Available Online – Poetry as Initiation: The Center for Hellenic Studies Symposium on the Derveni Papyrus

The Center for Hellenic Studies is pleased to announce the online publication of Poetry as Initiation: The Center for Hellenic Studies Symposium on the Derveni Papyrus by Ioanna Papadopoulou and Leonard Muellner.

 

The Derveni Papyrus is the oldest known European “book.” It was meant to accompany the cremated body in Derveni Tomb A but, by a stroke of luck, did not burn completely. Considered the most important discovery for Greek philology in the twentieth century, the papyrus was found accidentally in 1962 during a public works project in an uninhabited place about 10 km from Thessaloniki, and it is now preserved in the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki.

The papers in Poetry as Initiation discuss a number of open questions: Who was the author of the papyrus? What is the date of the text? What is the significance of burying a book with a corpse? What was the context of the peculiar chthonic ritual described in the text? Who were its performers? What is the relationship of the author and the ritual to the so-called Orphic texts?

You can order a printed copy of the book through Harvard University Press

Ioanna Papadopoulou and Leonard Muellner, eds. Poetry as Initiation: The Center for Hellenic Studies Symposium on the Derveni Papyrus
Foreword. Leonard Muellner
Introduction. Ioanna Papadopoulou, Testing Our Tools: Open Questions on the Derveni Papyrus
Chapter 1. Kyriakos Tsantsanoglou, Some Desiderata in the Study of the Derveni Papyrus
Chapter 2. Alberto Bernabé, On the Rites Described and Commented Upon in the Derveni Papyrus, Columns I–VI
Chapter 3. Franco Ferrari, Democritus, Heraclitus, and the Dead Souls: Reconstructing Columns I–VI of the Derveni Papyrus
Chapter 4. Fritz Graf, Derveni and Ritual
Chapter 5. Sarah Iles Johnston, Divination in the Derveni Papyrus
Chapter 6. Walter Burkert, How to Learn about Souls: The Derveni Papyrus and Democritus
Chapter 7. Jeffrey Rusten, Unlocking the Orphic Doors: Interpretation of Poetry in the Derveni Papryus between Presocratics and Alexandrians
Chapter 8. Yannis Z. Tzifopoulos, The Derveni Papyrus and the Bacchic-Orphic Epistomia
Chapter 9. Claude Calame, The Derveni Papyrus between the Power of Spoken Language and Written Practice: Pragmatics of Initiation in an Orpheus Poem and Its Commentary
Chapter 10. Anton Bierl, “Riddles over Riddles”: “Mysterious” and “Symbolic” (Inter)textual Strategies: The Problem of Language in the Derveni Papyrus
Chapter 11. Evina Sistakou, Reading the Authorial Strategies in the Derveni Papyrus
Chapter 12. David Sider, The Orphic Poem of the Derveni Papyrus
Chapter 13. Richard Hunter, The Garland of Hippolytus

And See AWOL's List of Open Access Publications of the Center for Hellenic Studies