The letter to Hermione from Oxyrhynchus, which went on auction at the end of last May at Forum Auctions, has found a new home. The buyer decided to gift it to the University of Michigan Papyrology Collection as just announced by Brendan Haug, Archivist and Associate Professor of Classics at Ann Arbor.
Auction season is in full swing and while waiting for the Crosby-Schøyen Codex to go on sale for a projected stellar price, a more affordable offer of a deaccessioned Egypt Exploration Fund distribution papyrus is available at Forum Auctions.
The papyrus, P.Oxy. XIV 1767 in technical terminology, was given to Ampleforth Abbey Library in York, but the institution at some point sold it through the market – I don’t know exactly when and how but surely it was offered by London Sotheby’s on December 7, 2010. Those were the glorious days when the Green family appeared on the collecting scene throwing money anywhere the words “Bible” and “Christian” were mentioned. Sotheby’s curators tried the Christian connection in this case too, as you can gather from the catalogue entry, but despite the effort the papyrus sold for just £6000. To give you comparative prices, consider that four years later five papyri, distributed back in the days by the Egypt Exploration Fund to the Pacific School of Religion/Badè Museum, were privately sold through a bookseller at a much higher price, ca. $150,000, and none of them were of Christian content. (I covered part of this disgraceful story in 2016). In 2020 the same papyri were again on offer, even more discretely directly to booksellers, at an undisclosed price by someone named “Alan”. (If you’re curious, my book will be out this September with more details on this and other stories).
All these ex-Egypt Exploration Fund distribution papyri are licit, meaning that they were exported with licenses from Egypt when it was legal and their title of ownership passed through different institutions and people legally. But what about the ethical aspects of these dealings? A lot has been said and written about this: deaccessions of the society’s papyri and other antiquities defeat the gift mandate to be good custodians, and academics should not be involved at all in this kind of business, as explained in various professional association policies and hopefully in university ethical statements too.
And what about the traders? Dealers and auction houses, individually and as members of professional associations, could do certainly better. For instance, they could finally start producing catalogues with full and documented provenance of what they sell. They can also encourage conversations between sellers, collectors and institutions, so that objects might find a loving and caring home, as library and museum associations recommend too.
But looking at what is still happening after a decade of campaigning, I do wonder if there is any interest to improve practices. Not to mention legislations.
For more on these issues I suggest the following open access readings, with further bibliography:
Alice Stevenson, Scattered Finds: Archaeology, Egyptology and Museums, London: UCL 2019.
Roberta Mazza, Papyri, Ethics, and Economics: A Biography of P.Oxy. 15.1780 (𝔓39), Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 52 (2015), 113-142.
Brent Nongbri, “The Ethics of Publication: Papyrology,” Bryn Mawr Classical Review 25 May 2022, https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2022/2022.05.25/
Usama Gad, “Decolonizing the Troubled Archive of Papyri and Papyrology in a Global Digital Age: A View from Contemporary Egypt,” in Garrick V. Allen, Usama Gad, Kelsie Rodenbiker, Anthony Royle, and Jill Unkel (eds.), The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri at Ninety: Literature, Papyrology, Ethics, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022.
Ancient Asset Investment website today: down for maintenance.
It is saved, however, on archive.org. Just click on this link.
In his blog, Paul Barford has recently called attention to the “dedication events” listed in the Ancient Asset Investment webpage on “Gifting”. I report here what I have found so far through the web on the basis of that list, some of Barford’s notes, and new evidence. All the donations linked with Ancient Asset Investment and Scott Carroll I have been able to track down have the sponsors in common: Ken and Barbara Larson.
1) 31 March 2014, Bethel University, St Paul Minnesota. Dedication of a Torah donated by Ken and Barbara Larson. The Torah, about 89 feet long, is said to come from Baghdad and dates predominantly to the early 17th century, with later insertions. A lecture entitled “From Baghdad to Bethel: A Holy Legacy” was given by Scott Carroll, Ph.D., Director, Sr. Research Scholar, Manuscript Research Group. See among others: https://www.bethel.edu/events/torah-dedication and https://www.bethel.edu/news/clarion/articles/2014/April/bethel-torah
2) 4 September 2014, Multnomah University, Portland Oregon. According to the University blog, “Ken and Barbara Larson, from Bonita Springs, Fla., are giving a rare and valuable Torah to Multnomah University.” They are said to be assisted by Ancient Asset Investment. A dedication ceremony has taken place at the beginning of this month:
According to the report, Scott Carroll gave a speech in this occasion: “The 89-foot scroll,” Carroll said, “was composed somewhere in Eastern Europe during the Reformation…If this Torah could talk to us, imagine what it could say and what it’s seen,” said Carroll. “It was preserved through the Enlightenment and the Holocaust. Through a wonderful turn of Providence, it’s in your community now.”
3) 18 September 2014: Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, IL. A Torah scroll originally from Germany and dating to the late 1400s or early 1500s is donated by Ken and Barbara Larson: http://news.tiu.edu/2014/09/19/torah-scroll/
An interesting online article (Donald Libenson, in Capital Gazette, 21 October 2014) is shedding some light on the motivations behind Mr Larson’s donation. It explains that Mr Larson “credited a friend who’s an author and speaker with inspiring the gift. Larson described him as ‘an apologist,’ a defender of Christianity based on historical evidence and other philosophical arguments. ‘He told me he had purchased an ancient Torah and he found it to be helpful in his speaking and teaching. Most people have never seen a Torah. (For each Torah we’ve donated) I have asked the faculty if they’ve ever read from one or touched one, and the answer was no.’ ” Later in the story we have also a report on the evaluation of the scroll: “it has been valued at more than $400,000”.
4) 30 September 2014: The Master’s Seminary, Sun Valley CA. The Facebook page of the Seminary reports on October 1: “Yesterday The Master’s Seminary was given a Torah Scroll by Ken and Barbara Larson of Minneapolis. The scroll, originally crafted in the 18th century in Yemen is a unified work (not a combination of various scrolls merged into one).” A picture with Scott Carroll and the Larson is posted too. A recent donation of a 17th century Torah Scroll is recalled also on the Seminary’s Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master’s_Seminary
5) 8 November 2014: Veritas Evangelical Seminar, Santa Ana CA. “In the presence of 1500 attendees at its annual National Apologetics Conference, Veritas Evangelical Seminary received and dedicated a rare Hebrew Torah scroll. The donors, Ken and Barbara Larson, are passionate about Israel and the Bible, visiting the archaeologically rich nation four times.”The source is an article on Christian News Wire (1 December 2014). The donation is also announced on Twitter.
6) 5 December 2014: Dallas Theological Seminary, Dallas TX. The Facebook page of the Seminary reports on this date: “This morning Dr. Scott Carroll, Director and Senior Research Scholar for the Manuscript Research Group, donated a beautiful Torah scroll to DTS”.
The scroll is paid for by Barbara and Ken Larson, as we learn from the presentation ceremony posted online:
Here Carroll explains that the scroll most ancient portions date to the “late 1600 early 1700”. A section comes from Spain, but the scroll in the current shape seems to be from Morocco. Although the details remain vague – as always with our Indiana Scott – Carroll says that the Torah was brought to Israel by people constraint to leave their countries and once there it passed to local collectors with whom “they” – I guess he and Hillard – collaborate. In this way the manuscript went to the Larson, who are then introduced.
7) February 2015: Trinity Western University, Langley Canada. As reported in a local newspaper online: “A 450-year-old Torah scroll recently gifted to Trinity Western University (TWU) by donors Kenneth and Barbara Larson will give students access to an original Hebrew manuscript originating from Morocco. The 16th century scroll was presented by the Larson to mark their 50th wedding anniversary. The donation of the Torah was paired with funds for a Torah room in TWU’s Alloway Library.” The donation is also reported in the University webpage.
In conclusion, so far I have been able to count 7 Torah scrolls donated by Ken and Barbara Larson through the agency of Scott Carroll and Ancient Asset Investment to Christian education institutions in a short turn of time. Some of the stories attached to the scrolls look terribly similar, but it is impossible to verify details unless the institutions that have received these gifts will decide to check and enquire further. If I may, I warmly recommend them to do these checks because if Scott Carroll’s knowledge of Torah scrolls pairs his knowledge of papyri, I see problems coming.
It would be interesting, among other things, to know how much the Larson have paid for the scrolls, and how much they have declared their value for in tax returns.
There are of course all the other issues related to collection and acquisition history of these scrolls, export licenses, and so forth so on besides ethical questions regarding the Jewish history of these objects, in some cases even their connection to the Holocaust. It may be all perfectly legal. But I leave the reader to think about this story and to decide if all this sounds ethical.
I personally do not need the law or academic associations policies in order to decide for myself.
A reader of this blog, Beau Quilter, was so nice to edit the long and remarkably boring performance of Josh McDowell on papyri from mummy cartonnage and the truth of the Bible. We now have a two minutes peak that I hope all of you will watch:
I like the words Beau Quilter has added at the end as a comment to a quote of McDowell himself: “Apparently since they own it, it’s ok’.
This sentence underlines two important elements of this sad story. First, the incredible lack of any awareness about the importance of archaeological evidence that this man and others, like Scott Carroll (who apparently dismounted mummy cartonnage for the Green collection and possibly others in the past), demonstrate. The aggressive cultural discourse behind their words and actions would deserve a treatise on its own. People like Josh McDowell and Scott Carroll are a threat not only for the damages they have procured to cultural heritage patrimony, but also for their misuse of ancient manuscripts in public discourses on the Bible. Their faith must be very weak if they need scraps of papyrus in order to prove the value of the Scriptures.
The second element I wish to bring to your attention is that for once there is some truth in what McDowell is saying: from what I have gathered, according to the American and other legislations, the legal owner of an ancient object can dispose of it as he/she wishes. This opens a number of interesting considerations on responsible and irresponsible private collecting that would deserve a longer, separate post. But that ownership must be legal: if it comes out that the object was bought illegally, in this case that the mask does not have clear provenance, everything changes. In principle, the legal owner of these destroyed masks could pursue McDowell and other iconoclasts, and the dealers who sold the objects, in order to be compensate for the loss.
Why Josh McDowell and other owners of antiquities are not revealing names of the dealers they have purchased masks and other cartonnage from, and do not publicly provide documents proving that their acquisitions are legal? Do they fear that the eventual legal owner of those artefacts (e.g. the Egyptian Government) will pursue them in court one day?
Slide commented by C. Evans, screen shot from YouTube video
Do we need to comment on the last articles about professor Craig Evans and the Gospel of Mark fragment? We do, it seems, from the many questions posed by readers of those articles, this blog and many others. But first, I wish to thank all the journalists who have given time and space to this topic and helped to raise questions on what is happening.
So here’s a re-cap with some explanations and a couple of new thoughts:
1) There is not a single New Testament or early Christian papyrus published so far coming from mummy cartonnage. Correct me if I am wrong, please. Mummy cartonnage = a sort of papier-mâché constituted by various materials sometimes including recycled papyri and used for fabricating masks and other covering panels for mummies.
2) According to current scholarship and archaeological finding, the use of recycling papyri for making mummy masks and panels ended in the early Augustan period, i.e. when Jesus was not even born or just a child. So what reported under point 1) is unsurprising. We have hundreds Ptolemaic papyri coming from mummy cartonnage, very few from the Roman period, and at the moment all dated inside this span of time. On the standard dates see e.g. D. Obbink, ‘P. Artemid.: The Artefact’, in: K. Brodersen, J. Elsner, Images and Texts on the “Arthemidorus Papyrus”, Stuttgart 2009.
Of course we would be very excited to learn that there is a massive shift in the current state of research, but without access to the evidence of this shift (images, data and publications) it is impossible to comment if this is really happening or not. These are not conditions in which a serious public debate on the topic can take place. These are perfect conditions, however, for the flourishing of ignorance and propaganda as a consequence.
3) Papyrologists have developed various methods for recovering papyri from cartonnage, which nowadays do not necessitate the complete dissolving or destroying of the masks or panels. If you pay attention to what Evans say in the video and interviews it seems clear that he does not know what he is talking about: he and the team he mentions are not experts on the matter since they apparently are not updated on the current methodology and need to destroy artifacts in order to get the fragments out (keep your cartonnage away from them!).
Although as I said technology is less invasive than it used to be, it still is at some extent. It is the case to remind the audience that any kind of intervention on ancient artifacts, even conservation, presents problems and before being performed teams of experts – in this case papyrologists, conservators, Egyptologists, etc. – evaluate pros and cons in order to decide if and how to proceed. Precise protocols are followed and the process is documented through imaging, recording and publishing. Nothing of this kind has happened yet in this case. We have not seen anything except slides with masks dating to the Ptolemaic – v. early Roman period as those previously shown in other videos – featuring Scott Carroll, director of the Green collection from 2009 to 2012, Josh McDowell and others – which we are carefully archiving since one year by now. Those slides and videos are very alarming: I will change my opinion on what has happened so far the day I will be given access to solid information not only on the process employed, but also on the legal acquisition circumstances of the cartonnage dissolved.
What is also alarming for someone who is supposed to teach and write on a history subject, is the way Evans approaches archaeological objects and their significance: he is reassuring us that “We’re not talking about the destruction of any museum-quality piece,” as if all the rest of our ancient evidence has no importance whatsoever. Do we need to comment further on this? I do not think so.
On mummy cartonnage dismounting and conservation I recommend J. Frösén “Conservation of ancient papyrus materials” written for the Oxford Handbook of Papyrology. Check out also the webpage of Helsinki University dedicated to the topic: http://www.helsinki.fi/hum/kla/papupetra/papyrus/cartonnage.html.
4) Why this obsession for cartonnage? This is indeed a fascinating question on which I am pondering since a while. For sure this is a means through which speakers (e.g. Christian apologists and academics) may evoke a sense of mystery and adventure that appeals so much to the media and the public. The oldest fragment of the Bible, new lines of famous classical authors, the expertise of the team…have you got a pale idea of everyday life in a papyrus collection? What we mainly recover are tax receipts, accounts and letters of people who ask to send donkeys up and down the Nile and then attach greetings for the entire village: and I mean name by name, and the names are odd. It is super cool, but it would hardly have any media coverage, right? Even more dramatically, academics are far from cool, trust me: badly dressed, usually unfit and clumsy, always exhausted. They spend most of their time in small untidy offices dealing with bureaucracy with the mirage to sit in a dusty library or a museum. There are the archaeologists, true, but I am mostly told unedifying stories of insects, diarrhea, and bad sweat smell. Yes, we are miles away from Indiana Jones…
Anyway, dealers should be quite happy about all the recent cartonnage advertisement. The Christian papyri stories, and the Sappho fragments news too, must have increased the appeal of cartonnage on the market: I am very curious to keep an eye on prices in auction catalogues, eBay and elsewhere. Taking aside nice masks and decorated panels, these materials are not very attractive for the average collector: the promise of hidden gems could be a good way to pack them nicely for sale.
Finally, I start thinking that cartonnage may represent a very convenient way for collections and collectors to do some papyri laundry. Let’s consider this scenario: you are a collector who buys mummy cartonnage and other Egyptian antiquities on the market with solid acquisition history and records. For instance, you go to a London auction and purchase a collection of mummy panels or other cartonnage (book-coverings and similar), with legal acquisition records (e.g. documents attesting that the pieces were already in a European collection in 1950). You do buy a lot of this stuff because you love Egypt, the mummies, the paintings on the panels, and papyri of all sorts, or maybe you are planning to open a museum or a library. Then you or someone working for you find some dodgy papyri on sale let’s say in Egypt, Turkey, or on eBay, and since you have some training in papyrology or you have an expert on your payroll, you do realize that these are fragments from a Gospel or from a famous classical author. (And they are a bargain in comparison to those sold by auction houses, or London and New York antiquities shops). Surely, for these you will never get good acquisition circumstances records. But as long as all of those involved in the transaction will keep their mouth closed, you could always pretend that those dodgy papyri come from the cartonnage you bought in London and later dismounted with your staff. You can even be so lucky to have made the regular purchase from a dealer who does not keep images or records of the pieces on sale, especially when they appear in the shape of insignificant papyri glued together (book coverings and other recycled papyri) or small pieces of mummy panels. We have learnt that even a big auction house like Christie’s happens not to keep images and records of pieces of this kind in some cases.
Obviously, these are all fantasies. In the real world people are never too brilliant and would certainly commit many mistakes. So do not try to embark into a criminal career following these suggestions: you will go to jail soon or later, I bet…
5) To conclude: will this Mark fragment be ever published? Does it even exist? Good questions: who knows? Well some people do actually know, but will not speak because they have signed non-disclosure agreements (another recent innovation, unheard in our fields before all this started): for instance Evans and Daniel Wallace, who both apparently saw or were informed about the papyrus in question. But also the Green collection team should know something, at least if Evans is telling us lies when saying that the fragment will be published by Brill, the publisher of the Green papyri (has Brill anything to say on this?). Mike Holmes, director of the Green Scholars Initiative, has posted an elusive answer on his blog after I and others pressed him with questions.
The lack of information does not help. What a mess!
The Galatians 2 Coptic fragment when advertised on eBay in 2012, screen shot from The Quaternion blog post
As many of my readers already know, there was an entire session devoted to issues of provenance at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in San Diego. Three papers were presented, followed by respondents, and then we had a lively general discussion. I have enjoyed the session, and what has been said has made me re-thinking about many of the issues at stake. But before I’ll write at length about this, I feel necessary to give important updates on the acquisition history of the Sappho papyrus fragments and the Coptic Galatians 2 papyrus on which I have written in the past. I was given the details which follow right before the SBL session, they were swiftly included in my paper, and I think it is my duty now to report them in the blog.
Full information on the acquisition history of the new Sappho fragments will be given by Dirk Obbink in a forthcoming article in ZPE. An entire session at the American Philological Association/Archaeological Institute of America annual meeting in New Orleans (Session 5, 9th January 2015) will be devoted to the new Sappho poems: the first paper by Obbink will address, among others, issues of provenance, as you can read from the program.
The fragments do not come from mummy cartonnage, as previously written by Obbink in his TLS article, but from book binding cartonnage; their provenance is documented, and proofs that they were out of Egypt before 1972. The book binding was dismounted before the papyri were studied and then published respectively by Dirk Obbink (P.Sapph. Obbink) and by S. Burris, D. Obbink, and J. Fish (P.GC. 105).
The Galatians 2 Coptic fragment (GC.MS.000462) was purchased in 2013 by Steven Green from a trusted dealer; the Museum of the Bible/Green Collection archives do have files attesting that the papyrus was part of the David Robinson papyrus lot sold at a Christie’s auction in London in November 2011. The files do not explain what happened to the manuscript between November 2011 and October 2012, when it was on sale on eBay, and how it went from eBay to the dealer who sold it to Green. The only person who would be able to explain how a papyrus legally acquired at a Christie’s auction in London went on sale on an eBay account located in Turkey at this point would be the above mentioned trusted dealer, whose identity remains undisclosed.
I am confident that some form of public access to the acquisition data and hopefully documents of the objects belonging to the Green Collection/Museum of the Bible will be provided in the near future.
The John Rylands Seminar in Papyrology
25 October 2014, Christie Room, The John Rylands Library, 150 Deansgate, Manchester
A brief introduction on the aims of the seminar is available from here: Aims
PROGRAM
10:45-11:00 Welcome/Introduction: Roberta Mazza (University of Manchester)
11:00 -11:30 David Gill (University Campus Suffolk): What does ‘provenance’ mean?
11:30-12:00 Neil Brodie (University of Glasgow): The role of academics
12:00-12:30 Stuart Campbell (University of Manchester): Mesopotamian objects in a conflicted world
12:30-13:30 Lunch
Chair: Roslynne Bell (University of Manchester)
13:30-14:00 Roberta Mazza (University of Manchester): Who owns the past? Private and public papyrus collections
14:00-14:30 Chris Naunton (Egypt Exploration Society, London): Association policies: the case of the Egypt Exploration Society
14:30-15:00 Coffee Break
15:00-15:30 Vernon Rapley (V&A Museum, National Museum Security Group, London): ‘Working together.’ Law enforcement and cultural sector, intelligence sharing and cooperation
15:30-16:00 James Ede (Charles Ede Ltd, London): Dealers: trade, traffic and the consequences of demonization
16:00-16:45 The way forward: round table
Discussants include David Trobisch (Director of the Green Collection, Washington DC), Marcel Marée (The British Museum), Nikolaos Gonis (UCL), Campbell Price (Manchester Museum), Nicole Vitellone (University of Liverpool), William Webber (Art Loss Register), Donna Yates (University of Glasgow)
Everybody is welcome!
UPDATE 23 September: Due to unexpected growing interest, I now kindly ask people who wish to attend to confirm it to me via email due to space limitations: [email protected]
This conference and research project have not been funded by The British Academy.
Mummy mask of the Ptolemaic period, probably from Hawara, Manchester Museum 2781.a
As all of you should know by now, I am remarkably pedantic. Therefore when I don’t know much about a topic, I go back to books and sometimes the Internet. Being mostly interested in Byzantine papyri, I had to refresh my knowledge of papyri from mummy cartonnage and related matters, since they have become such a hot topic after the publication of the new Sappho fragments (P. Sapph. Obbink and P.GC.105), and the YouTube adventures of the two Palmolive Indiana Jones retrieving New Testament papyri through mummy masks washing-up. So I thought to share what I have learnt so far.
In lesson one of any course in papyrology or related subject, you would be taught that there are two main sources from where you can legally or illegally retrieve papyri: excavating the remains of ancient cities, cemeteries, deposits or rubbish heaps, and dismounting mummies or book bindings, coverings and similar agglomerations of papyrus and other materials. Papyri can be found in mummy contexts, so to speak, in two main forms. They could have been used for fabricating mummy masks and panels, mixed together with other materials such as linen, and then covered with stucco and painting (the so-called papier mache), or they could have been used for wrapping or filling the mummies themselves. This second case is what B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt found, for instance, in the sacred crocodile cemetery of Tebtunis, and later in other villages in the Fayum when papyrology was in its early days at the beginning of the 20th century. Possibly the first to have done experiments for retrieving papyri from mummy cartonnage was the French archaeologist Jean Antoine Letronne around 1825; he was disappointed by their bad status of preservation and the administrative contents. Sometimes the papyri retrieved from panels covering the feet or the breast of the mummies preserve the shape of the elements they come from. You can see an example of feet-shaped papyri in the Berkeley Tebtunis collection clicking here; you can have an idea of the appearance of mummies covered by such masks and panels from an image of a Ptolemaic one nowadays in the Louvre, clicking here (I know, it is a free-from-copyright image, but mummies scare me to death and I don’t like having a whole one in this post…).
From a rough calculation, I would say that the vast majority of our legal and illegal findings have derived from discoveries in situ; fewer papyri have come from mummy cartonnage or other similar kinds of papyrus recycling. (You will not get percentages from me: I refuse numbers as a form of resistance to a present where everybody knows the price and measure of everything, but the value and meaning of nothing).
Mummy fillings, wrappings and mummy cartonnage are renown for being an excellent source of papyri of the Ptolemaic period, which are fewer in absolute numbers than those of the following Roman and Byzantine periods, and therefore particularly important to scholars of the Hellenistic period. According to standard papyrology manuals, the practice of fabricating cartonnage for mummy masks and panels went on throughout the entire Ptolemaic period, and ended towards the end of the Augustan era, so at the beginning of the first century AD.
The retrieval of papyri from mummy panels and masks presents a number of problems and issues due not only to the technical aspects of the process, but also to the damages it procures to the objects. As you may imagine, there are different views about what comes first, either the mummy masks and panels, or the texts inside them. Therefore papyrologists and conservators have been working hard for finding methods for obtaining papyri from mummy cartonnage that take all these issues into consideration. Nowadays imaging technologies can help not only through the recording of the entire process, but also and foremost through the developing of non-destructive ways for retrieving and reading papyri. However at the moment, as J. Frösén reminds us in a dedicated chapter of the Oxford Handbook of Papyrology (“Conservation of ancient papyrus materials”, p. 88), “the recovery of papyrus from cartonnage is still the subject of controversy. Admittely it interferes with the integrity of the cartonnage as an artifact”.
Among the conservators who have worked in the field of papyri from mummy cartonnage there is Michael Fackelmann, a conservator active in Vienna in the seventies-eighties of last century. Fackelmann is an elusive figure, I have discovered, although he wrote important contributions on papyrus restoration that you find in the standard papyrology bibliography. Interestingly, he became also a collector and dealer of papyri, which were sometimes sold to university collections worldwide besides to private collectors. In those years there was much less awareness of the importance of papyrus archaeological provenance and acquisition circumstances than nowadays; I have been constantly reminded recently of the long history of the issues of ‘provenance’, and how much they are embedded in our disciplines and even in the birth of papyrology. I think historical awareness does not excuse present practices, and above all invites future change for better ones.
In any case, what I have realized is that some of the papyri connected with Fackelmann’s activities are particularly important in the history of dismounting mummy cartonnage, because they challenge the above-mentioned standard chronology of papyri from this kind of source. In other words, there have been cases of papyri that are said to come from mummy cartonnage and to date after the Augustan period, other than the recent Sappho fragments, dated to the 3rd century AD by their editors on the basis of C14 analysis and palaeographical considerations, and the New Testament texts that the Palmolive Indian Jones declare they found dissolving mummy masks. On these and other papyri challenging the traditional chronology we’ll talk in future posts.
So-called Sappho from Pompeii (Naples, MANN 9084)
From Wikicommons
The director of the Museum of the Bible/Green Collection, David Trobisch, has kindly informed me via email that the collection is going towards full digitisation and open access. As it happens in many other collections, “in some cases items are put on reserve and not accessible until the research has been done.” He writes that information on the acquisition circumstances of the Green Sappho fragments and their relation with the London Sappho will be provided in a forthcoming publication by Dirk Obbink.
As for the acquisition circumstances of Galatians 2 (GC 462), the Green collection has purchased it “through a trusted dealer that we have done business with over many years”.
I thank David Trobisch for the answers he is constantly providing; it is clear that his arrival is a dramatic step forward for the Green Collection. My only comment is that this dealer must not be so trustworthy since the papyrus was on sale from e-Bay Turkish seller MixAntik in 2012.
“I figured about 65 classical texts…”Dr. Scott Carroll in Mexico, September 2013
As the readers of my blog know, I am a big fan of Dr Scott Carroll, formerly on the payroll of the Green Collection (2009-2012) and recently collaborating with the evangelical apologist Josh McDowell, as you can read in a recent post of Brice C. Jones. I am fascinated by this Indiana Jones of Biblical Studies, as I have explained in an old post, and desperate to meet him in person.
At the moment, I am just following his adventures on the web. I know that a meeting with him would be an amazing experience, as I understand while watching the faces of people gathering en masse for his talks in the videos I am now religiously collecting for my amusement.
However, I found this particular video of an event organised by the University of the Nations for a workshop in Mexico last September 2013 a bit concerning. Here Scott, after having explained what his and his wife’s organisation (I guess the Scott Carroll Manuscripts & Rare Books and The Manuscript Research Group) do, starts moving around what do seem glazed papyrus fragments and other artefacts. Then he addresses the fascinating topic of papyri from mummy cartonnage. He jokes about the smell of mummy cartonnage over the house stove to the despair of his wife, and alludes to the scams you may find on eBay looking for cartonnage. Finally, he explains how to extract papyrus fragments from mummy cartonnage showing images from his computer. He says that the procedure he shows through what seems to be powerpoint slides – that you can see in the screen shots I took from min. 24:40 onwards in the video (see below), but I really recommend to watch the video itself – was performed at Baylor University (Texas) where, he asserts, he had an appointment. Unless he is lying, which I cannot believe because he is a good Christian, he must refer to the days when he was working for the Green Collection and the Green Scholars Initiative, since Baylor University has been collaborating with both at least from September 2011. In fact, an event lead by Scott Carroll consisting into the dismounting of a mummy mask for obtaining papyri took place at Baylor University and involved professors and students of the Department of Classics on September 9, 2011, as reported in the Bulletin of the Department (pp. 1-2).
Can you help me tracking down this Indiana Jones of Biblical Studies for an interview (and a picture with autograph, obviously)? Can you add details, corrections or integration to the information retrieved so far? Were you part of the public for any of these scholarly or wider audience events? I’d love to hear from you…
Roberta Mazza 
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