ZPE 172 (2010)
Luppe, W., Mutmaßungen über die Ursache der Pest bei Dictys Cretensis (zu P.Oxy. LXXIII 4943)
Recent publications of papyri & ostraca 4th BC-8th AD; conferences, lectures etc. from Papy-L and other sources as noted. PLEASE SEND SUGGESTIONS
This volume is a collection of studies dealing with one of the most famous Greek manuscripts of the Middle Ages, the Venetus A, a prized possession of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice (Marcianus Graecus Z. 454 [= 822]). This Byzantine luxury codex dates back to the tenth century AD and contains the oldest complete text of the Iliad, with a unique set of marginal notes that preserve, among other things, the work on the poem of the most prominent Alexandrian scholars of the Hellenistic age. The manuscript occupies an important place in the history of modern Homeric studies; in the fifteenth century it was part of the personal library of cardinal Basileios Bessarion, who donated his books to the city of Venice. Bessarion's gift was to constitute the core of the Marciana Library, where our manuscript lay effectively forgotten until the end of the eighteenth century, when a French scholar, Jean Baptiste Gaspard d'Ansse de Villoison, rediscovered it and published its contents (1788). Villoison's edition created new interest in Homer and in the history of the text of the epics, and led to the publication in 1795 of F. A. Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum, a work that marks the beginning of modern Homeric scholarship.
This book publishes and describes 1446 ostraca that were found during excavations at Abu Mina, that "religious tourist attraction" (P. van Minnen in Egypt in the Byzantine World, 300-700 Cambridge 2007, p. 207), forty kilometers southwest of Alexandria. Of these 1088 receive full treatment with diplomatic transcription and references to the scribe and form of the document (but no translation), while the remaining 358 ostraca only receive a brief description, most of which were provided by the people who prepared an initial edition of this material, Patrick Robinson and Georgina Fantoni.
Egyptian funerary texts of the Graeco-Roman period are less well known than their Pharaonic predecessors. This relative obscurity is partly due to their "lateness" in Egyptological terms, but also because of their diversity and complexity. Modern scholars have tended to group the earlier funerary texts into large corpora (e.g., Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, etc.), but the later texts defy such broad categorization. Many later compositions were used in a variety of configurations, and the boundaries between individual "books" could be fluid. The complexity of these later funerary texts has made their study as a whole difficult, but the volume under review here will significantly change this situation. In Traversing Eternity, Mark Smith provides an authoritative overview of the funerary literature of Graeco-Roman Egypt, with translations of some sixty texts, extensive introductory material for each and a general introduction for the corpus as a whole. For the first time, the majority of this diverse body of texts is gathered together in a single volume that is an essential resource for anyone interested in Egyptian funerary beliefs and practices of the later periods.
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