A Checklist of the Egyptian Museum's Unpublished Greek Papyri

A Checklist of the Egyptian Museum's Unpublished Greek Papyri
Usama Gad

During the past two decades, papyrologists trying to keep track of publications of the papyri in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo listed in Grenfell and Hunt’s 1903 volume of the Catalogue Général des Antiquités Égyptiennes du Musée du Caire have been well served by published concordances, first by the concordance provided by the authors themselves, Index I. Bibliography, pp. 111-112, then by K. A. Worp, “Die veröffentlichten P.Cair.: Eine Konkordanz,” ZPE 91 (1992) 95-98, and finally by addenda by A. Martin und G. Nachtergael in CdE 72 (1997) 305f. An adapted version of this concordance list can be consulted online; in this one can find all the numbers that have appeared in BAC until volume 26 (2009).

No such help has been readily available for the still-unpublished papyri of that volume. Since the AIP’s International Photographic Archive of Papyri has photographs of about 4600 papyri of the Egyptian Museum and it is available to all papyrologist worldwide, it can easily happen that the same papyrus text is edited by more than one scholar at a time. Moreover, because the papyri in P.Cair.Cat. have served as a major source of unpublished papyri for Egyptian students, it has happened that an Egyptian M.A. or Ph.D. thesis has included a papyrus simultaneously edited by an international papyrologist, or that the publication of a papyrus text escapes the notice of the national editor of the same papyrus. No doubt these instances are not intentional trespasses on the AIP’s guiding principle of Amicitia Papyrologorum. This checklist is intended to help colleagues to avoid such unintentional duplication of effort in the future, and it is hoped that it can be updated and corrected regularly...