It might come as a surprise to some, as it did to me, that Peter Fraser's monumental work Ptolemaic Alexandria (1972) was at one point in his career subordinate to a planned corpus of Ptolemaic inscriptions from Egypt. For whatever reason, the study of Alexandria gained the upper hand, and this corpus never appeared. Now, almost 50 years since the publication of that seminal work, we finally get the corpus, or at least one that owes much to Fraser's preliminary research. His photographs and squeezes, and the observations recorded in his notes and monograph are found throughout the pages of the first volume of the Corpus of Ptolemaic Inscriptions (hereafter CPI).
Volume 1 gives us the first 206 of the 650 inscriptions slated for the complete corpus, which almost doubles what Fraser intended to publish. It comprises inscribed texts coming from (or thought to come from) Alexandria and the Delta region. Many of them had been collected before, a large number by the brothers Étienne and André Bernand in the volumes I.Alex.Ptol., I.Delta, I.Louvre, I.Métriques (see CPI, pp. xxii–xxiii), but those editions had become dated. CPI thus faced little risk of being redundant. In fact, the corpus goes well beyond the earlier collections by furnishing transcriptions and translations of all texts (both Greek and Egyptian) that survive on the monuments it is concerned with.
CPI is arranged geographically and spans the entire ‘Ptolemaic’ period, beginning with the arrival of Alexander (hence the qualified ‘Ptolemaic’; see no. 186) and ending with the reign of Cleopatra (nos 60 and 125). It not only includes standard prose epigraphic fare: religious dedications, honorific inscriptions, some decrees; it also contains metrical inscriptions, which Fraser had not planned on despite having devoted part of a chapter of Ptolemaic Alexandria to epigrams (Chapter 10.3), plus several fascinating groups of bilingual foundation deposits preserved on glass, faience, mud, gold, silver and bronze. This category of text also receives a nice, detailed treatment by D. Thompson in The Epigraphy of Ptolemaic Egypt (hereafter EPE), a volume of essays edited by two of the CPI editors (Bowman and Crowther) that serves as a companion to the corpus. Additionally, there are interesting one-off texts, such as a third-century inscription from Mareia related to the workings of a sundial, a sort of epigraphic manual to assist in understanding such devices (CPI 106). It presumably stood near an actual sundial. This inscription, coupled with copies of the Kanopos decree (CPI 119, 129, 176, 369, 377, 573), which describe the introduction of the quadrennial leap year for the purpose of regulating religious festivals, shows the keen, but also very public interest in calendars and astronomy that existed in the Ptolemaic period.
CPI is not exhaustive, nor was it meant to be. It passes over many graffiti, dipinti and brief funerary inscriptions; however, the editors aim to provide lists of this material in the future on the CPI website (http://cpi.csad.ox.ac.uk/). Despite such omissions, it is well representative of the range of inscribed texts from Egypt, and not only those in the Greek language. It also includes multilingual texts, notably Greek-Egyptian, whether Greek-Demotic, Greek-Hieroglyphic or all three scripts. This is one of the hallmarks of the collection (Fraser intended only Greek). As the CPI editors state in the introduction, having all languages together is the only way to preserve ‘the socio-linguistic and cultural character of such texts’ (p. 5). Researchers from different disciplines, whether Classics, Ancient History or Egyptology, will surely benefit from this.
The general approach of this collection can thus be described as holistic and Egypt-oriented. This is seen, too, in the attention given not just to texts, but to physical aspects of the inscribed objects, such as the size, shapes and layout of letters, and to the overall spatial context of the inscriptions. This view to the whole monument is in keeping with current trends in the study of text-bearing objects, and one can appreciate from J. Masséglia's description in EPE of the cleaning and sophisticated imaging procedures (RTI and 3D) performed on the Philae obelisk, now at Kingston Lacey in Dorset, the importance that the CPI team placed on this. Moreover, the 101 figures (photographs and squeezes) accompanying the CPI texts not only enrich the volume, they visually reinforce this approach.
The editors make an effort to describe what was on any given monument and where it originally stood. But this runs into the constant problem, one that has attracted increased scrutiny with recent concern over the illicit trade of antiquities, that in quite a few cases the provenance of a given artefact or even its current location is unknown. In her contribution to EPE Mairs shows the painstaking lengths one can go to in order to reconstruct object biographies. One example she gives is of a group of five bilingual (Greek-Hieroglyphic) foundation plaques from a temple of Hathor-Aphrodite – which temple exactly is unclear. Comparing similar foundation deposits found in controlled excavations in Alexandria (again, see D. Thompson's article for the larger historical context of depositing plaques in temple foundations), Mairs concludes that ten plaques were likely originally deposited at the corners of the temple. From a range of diverse modern documents, such as ship passenger manifests, obituaries, auction notices etc., she then pieces together the agents and paths that brought these plaques from an Egyptian antiquities market to their respective homes in Athens, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum and the Schøyen Collection. This kind of post-excavation tracing (call it ‘museum archaeology’ if you like) can be very revealing, and CPI promises to facilitate it by bringing related objects together and giving some of the basic bibliography needed to investigate them. What a persistent obstacle unclear provenance poses, is readily seen throughout CPI and EPE. For example, of the five texts Bowman adduces as evidence for civic institutions in Alexandria (CPI 1, 4, 5, 49, 58), only two (CPI 4 and 58) are said to have secure provenance. Such uncertainty is something that any honest historian has to factor in, as Bowman does. Fortunately, not every question raised by the inscriptions collected in CPI rests in a significant way on provenance.
The texts collected in CPI elicit good cross-cultural perspectives, as seen in one of two articles by W. Clarysse in EPE. Richly illustrated, ‘Greek Texts on Egyptian Monuments’ is a diachronic survey of Greek inscriptions preserved on clearly Egyptian monuments – stelai with rounded tops and winged sun discs; statues; Egyptian buildings; temple furniture; mummy wrappings; sarcophagi. The article shows how deeply intertwined the Greek and the Egyptian population were. But more than that, it dampens the impulse to overinterpret evidence by, for example, searching for signs of Hellenisation among certain population groups in Egypt. Yes, a Greek inscription on an Egyptian monument could signal the tastes of Hellenised Egyptians, but it also might reflect, as Clarysse points out, the simple reality that only stelai with Egyptian motifs were available in a given place for inscribing with a Greek text. This approach is thus sensitive to possible local circumstances. The same can be said of S. Baralay's analysis in EPE of Hellenistic sacred dedications. This article departs from past studies of dedication formulas that focus on different epochs (Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic) by looking instead at local practice in Ptolemaic Egypt, more specifically at the impact of the dynastic cult on private religion. M. Paganini charts a similar course in his study of private associations in local communities of the Ptolemaic hinterland. His observations concerning the so-called topoi inscriptions, which marked the property of associations (usually meeting places), draw attention to the significance and sheer physical presence that associations must have had in villages and religious centres.
Another intersection that CPI engages with both directly and indirectly is that of papyri and inscriptions. Everyone knows that the number of extant Greek papyri in Egypt dwarfs that of inscriptions. But inscriptions are the only evidence of writing to survive in some places in Egypt, including some of the villages in the Delta represented in this first volume. And even when we have papyri, inscriptions can augment the information they give in important ways, as Clarysse shows in a second contribution to EPE, devoted to the intersecting worlds of inscriptions and papyri. As an example, he refers to some inscriptions from Theadelphia that will appear in a subsequent volume of CPI (236, 237, 244). They attest three local temples nowhere mentioned in the papyri from the same place. The fact that they are referenced on one writing material and not the other is easily explained, as inscriptions were often set up in temples and thus reveal things about the religious landscape of a place, while papyri from Theadelphia steer clear of people and subjects related to the temples. Thus, the inscriptional and the papyrological worlds never meet there. In Alexandria, too, where papyri have not been preserved, inscriptions give precious information about early cults, as illustrated by Savvopoulos in a contribution about the religious life of Ptolemaic Alexandria. And, as C. Fischer-Bovet demonstrates, the inscriptions set up by soldiers and officers offer a different perspective on this sector of society from the many extant papyri and ostraca referring to soldiers. For example, the mid to late Ptolemaic period showed a marked increase in dedications commissioned by soldiers and officers, both individually and in groups, which Fischer-Bovet sees as directly related to social, religious and political developments. Inscriptions became a chosen platform for the self- and corporate promotion of this part of the population.
A similar dichotomy can be explored in the case of inscriptional and non-inscriptional epigrams. There is a well-known papyrus in the so-called Zenon archive that preserves two epigrams, one elegiac, the other iambic, for an ‘Indian’ dog called Tauron that was killed in the act of protecting his master Zenon, who happened to work as an estate manager in the Egyptian village of Philadelphia for the chief financial officer of Egypt, a man named Apollonios. C.C. Edgar took for granted in his studies of this papyrus that at least one and maybe both of these epigrams were intended to be inscribed on stone, but others have apparently opted to see them as purely literary exercises (for bibliography see T.W. Pepper's article about the epigrams in the Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Congress of Papyrology [2010]). In my view, a couple of texts in CPI strengthen the case for the destined-for-stone interpretation of those verses. One of these texts will appear in CPI vol. 2 as no. 210, but Clarysse talks about it in his article concerning papyri and inscriptions (p. 167). It is a brief dedication for the god Anubis set up by a kynoboskos, ‘feeder of jackals’ or perhaps even just ‘dog breeder’, named Pasos, on behalf of the same Apollonios and Zenon of the papyri. This dedication ties the two men to a real stone monument – coincidentally, one in a canine context, i.e. the cult of Anubis. It is no proof that the epigrams for the dog Tauron were once inscribed, but it captures the men's epigraphic footprint (further seen in CPI 341, a dedication made by this Apollonios). We have stones that preserve inscriptions in their names! This, I believe, makes it easier to imagine the two men having the Tauron epigrams cut in stone. The second inscription that has some relevance to the case of Zenon's dog is a funerary epigram for a slain cobra (CPI 203). It dates to a century or more after Zenon, but shows another animal being commemorated in verse, even if the cobra speaks in the first person and the dog does not. If others cared to honour animals with inscribed epigrams, then why not Zenon? The point is that the metrical inscriptions were part of a larger social, cultural and historical context, which CPI helps illuminate. Hornblower's contribution to EPE explores this very nicely, particularly in the section about two inscribed epigrams composed by a poet named Herodes (forthcoming as CPI 403 and 404). The verses commemorate members of an Egyptian priestly family from Edfu active in the ‘Greek’ administration. Their names were Ptolemaios, Apollonios and Aphrodisia, and they happen also to be known from Hieroglyphic stelai by their Egyptian names Pamenches, Pasas and Hatheritis. Taken together, the different evidence related to this family gives a more complex picture than that gained from the epigrams alone.
CPI highlights connections that can easily be overlooked when texts are published separately or in scattered collections. For example, its geographical arrangement draws attention to the concentration of inscriptions related to the Jewish community in the Delta (p. 172). And it is remarkable to find a village like Terenouthis (Kom Abu Billo) being home to two verse inscriptions (CPI 171 and 173), but perhaps less surprising given that another inscription from this place, which is sandwiched in the corpus between the two metrical ones (CPI 172), relates to a gymnasium. There is no evidence connecting the verse texts to the gymnasium, but there is no denying that a cultural institution existed there that could have fostered interest in Greek epigrams.
The editors of CPI were able to draw on a large photographic archive in preparing their texts. This permitted them, Crowther in particular, to make a substantial contribution to the study of the palaeography of Ptolemaic inscriptions. Fraser seems to have laid much of the groundwork for this, as he left behind an unpublished manuscript on the subject. Crowther develops the topic in his well-illustrated chapter in EPE, republished in condensed form in the introduction to CPI. Because inscriptions are not infrequently undated or are dated to the reign of an uncertain ruler, palaeography is sometimes the only clue to the approximate date. Crowther describes the different script styles (e.g. cursive, civic and chancery) that coexisted at different stages in the Ptolemaic period. He sees the reign of Ptolemy IV as marking important changes in letter forms, as observed especially in the letters alpha, beta, epsilon, eta, zeta, theta/omicron, mu, pi, sigma, phi and omega. After this time, the script became increasingly more stylised, and its evolution is illustrated in a useful table (13.1) that will be a good point of reference for anyone needing to date a Ptolemaic inscription. The editors use the same criteria set out by Crowther to re-date some of the inscriptions in CPI.
There is no doubt that the Corpus of Ptolemaic Inscriptions will become the standard reference work for Ptolemaic inscriptions from Egypt, provided editors carry through with the remaining two volumes. One hopes, too, that they do good on their promise to include indexes to the entire corpus in volume 3. If there is any complaint here it is with some typos in the volume. A list of corrigenda has already been made available, also in PDF, on the CPI website (http://cpi.csad.ox.ac.uk/inscriptions/CPI-corrigenda.html), and some of the infelicities I observed I will communicate directly to the editors so that they can add them to that list.
