REVIEW (2) of Parsons, City of the Sharp-nosed Fishes

The strangely familiar world of Oxyrhynchus

Mary Beard
From the Times Literary Supplement
Peter Parsons
CITY OF THE SHARP-NOSED FISH
Greek lives in Roman Egypt
320pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £25.
978 0 297 64588 7

In AD 19, the Roman prince Germanicus paid a royal visit to Alexandria in Egypt. According to a surviving papyrus record, he was given a rapturous reception by the crowds. He had hardly got through the first sentence of his speech (“I was sent by my father, gentlemen of Alexandria . . .”) when they broke into applause. And cries of “Bravo” and “Good luck” continued to punctuate his address – as he begged for a chance to be heard in peace, explained how difficult his journey had been, and how much he was missing his family in Rome (including his adopted father, the Emperor Tiberius, and his “granny”, as he affectionately called the austere – and possibly murderous – Empress Livia), and complimented his listeners on their lovely historic town. The Alexandrians probably overdid their enthusiasm. Another papyrus preserves part of the text of an edict issued by Germanicus on this same visit. The gist of it is that if they continue to treat him like a god, then he will show his displeasure by staying away and making rather fewer epiphanies in the future. more at the Association for Latin Teaching

Source: Evanagelical textual Ciritism weblog, Fri. May 4 2007

Review of City of the Sharp Nosed Fishes in the NEW STATESMAN

Unearthing history

William Dalrymple

City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek lives in Roman Egypt
Peter Parsons
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 320pp, £25
ISBN 0297645889

Archaeology is a notoriously slow and painstaking science: months of careful brushing and trowelling often yield little more than a few pieces of bone, the odd rusty coin and a pile of discarded pottery. Few excavations get off to the sort of start achieved by two Oxford archaeologists, B P Grenfell and A S Hunt, when they sailed down the Nile in 1896 in search of papyrus.

Papyrus was a material up to then largely ignored by Victorian scholars, who had tended to concentrate their attentions on classical inscriptions on stone. Intending to change this, and track down a few lost fragments of classical Greek and early Christian literature, the two scholars decided to investigate the mounds in the Egyptian village of El-Bahnasa, having heard rumours that illicit antiquity dealers had been finding papyri there.

The modern village squatted on the site formerly occupied by Oxyrhynchus, which means "City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish". Of this great Greek metropolis remarkably little was left: a lithograph published in 1798 by Denon, one of the artists of the Napoleonic Survey of Egypt, showed little more than a few mounds, a single Roman column, the dome of a mosque and some palm trees. It was certainly nothing like the usual destinations of European archaeological expeditions such as the tombs of the Pharaohs, which, not long before, the Italian adventurer Belzoni had been entering with the aid of a battering ram; less still did the nondescript mounds resemble the Great Pyramids, one of whose hidden chambers had recently been penetrated by a rival British team who, with the characteristic delicacy of the Victorians abroad, achieved their results by the liberal use of dynamite. read the rest

Source: Google news sv papyri

P.J. Parsons, City of the sharp-nosed fish: Greek lives in Roman Egypt

In 1897 two Oxford archaeologists began digging a low sand-covered mound a hundred miles south of Cairo. When they had finally finished, ten years later, they had uncovered 500,000 fragments of papyri. Shipped back to Oxford, the meticulous and scholarly work of deciphering these fragments began. It is still going on today. As well as Christian writings from totally unknown gospels and Greek poems not seen by human eyes since the fall of Rome, there are tax returns, petitions, private letters, sales documents, leases, wills and shopping lists. What they found was the entire life of a flourishing market-town - Oxyrhynchos ( the city of the sharp-nosed fish' ), on a side branch of the Nile - encapsulated in its waste paper. The total lack of rain in this part of Egypt had preserved the papyrus beneath the sand, as nowhere else in the Roman Empire. We hear the voices of barbers, bee-keepers and boat-makers, dyers and donkey-drivers, plasterers and poets, weavers and wine-merchants, set against the great events of late antiquity: the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and the coming of Christianity, as well as the all-important annual flooding of the Nile. The result is an extraordinary and unique picture of everyday life in the Nile Valley between Alexander the Great in 300 BC and the Arab conquest a thousand years later.
Link to the BBC4 notes from the 2002 programme of teh same name
Source: worldcat