Paleography: Menander & the Mummy

The kitchen-sized Institut de Papyrologie at Paris’ ancient Sorbonne University is one of the oddities of modern science. In an era of high-budget research, the institute operates with a few dollars’ worth of unimpressive equipment, but its growing contribution to man’s knowledge of his ancient culture is yet to be assessed.

The lab owes its very existence, says Professor André Bataille, director of the institute, to the fact that during the 2nd and 3rd centuries B.C. wood was too expensive to be used in mummy cases for average Egyptians. As a result, funeral directors enclosed corpses in waste papyrus manuscripts coated with plaster and molded to a shape vaguely reminiscent of a human body.

No Glue. First step in the delicate process of retrieving the papyrus intact is to spray the mummy with hot diluted hydrochloric acid. In about ten minutes most of the plaster dissolves, and the wad of papyrus that is left is laid on a wire tray over a tank of steaming water. It poaches there for a while, gradually softening as the papyrologists encourage the process and separate the stuff with delicate tweezings.

This might not work with paper, but papyrus is tougher. It was made by cutting thin slices of the pith of the papyrus plant, laying them side by side and pressing two layers together with their grains running at right angles. Professor Bataille thinks that no glue or paste was used; the natural sap of the fresh-cut pith made the layers stick together. Sometimes the hot-water treatment restores the sheets until they are almost as good as new.

For raw material, the institute depends mostly on mummies from the cemetery of Ghoran, a village in Upper Egypt. Since Ghoran’s unlettered countryfolk produced too little waste papyrus to wrap their own dead, their undertakers went to Arsinoë, the provincial capital, and bought the contents of its wastebaskets, which were kept filled by the papyrus work of the swarming provincial bureaucracy. Most of the papyrus sheets that Professor Bataille untangles are startlingly similar to the waste paper of a modern office building —receipted bills, accounts, inventories, private and government contracts. This material fascinates historians with the light it casts on the business affairs of provincial Egypt during the Hellenistic period.

Literary Prize. Greek was the educated language of Egypt in those days, and most of the manuscripts are in Greek, along with some in Egyptian demotic script. Professor Bataille classifies the best of his finds, presses them between big white blotters and makes them available to qualified scholars.

Sometimes among the bills and accounts he finds a literary prize. Not long ago while his assistant, Mlle. Nicole Parichon, was cleaning the plaster off a mummy, she spotted a piece of papyrus that looked unusual. Other pieces matched it, and eventually a dozen pieces fitted together. They turned out to be part of a long, rolled-up scroll that contained 400 lines of a hitherto unknown play of Menander, a Greek playwright who died in 290 B.C. It is one of the oldest Greek manuscripts known, but the writing is almost as clear as fresh print.

Titled The Sicyonian, the play seems to be about the troubles of a girl named Philomene who wanted to be recognized as a citizen of Sicyon, a city in Greece. She was kidnaped by pirates, sold as a slave to a kind old man who turned out to be her true father. This complicated matters because by then she was in love with the old man’s son, her brother. Professor Bataille says that some of the play’s fragments are magnificent, but too many of them are missing for a full reconstruction of the unlikely plot. The Menander fragments, the professor suspects, were discards from the library of a well-educated Egyptian, and their discovery gives the institute an incentive to go on with its papyrus hunt. There may be other gems of Greek literature wrapping the mummies of Ghoran’s humble cemetery.