Everyday Ancients:
Todd Hickey shares secrets from the Tebtunis papyri

One day, an official was on patrol in the countryside when he came upon a large pool of blood. Interviewing the neighbors, he learned that a local man had gone missing. The next morning, the official sat down to write reports for his superiors. Two thousand years later and half a world away, that report now sits on UC Berkeley campus, above the Bancroft Library in the vault containing the Tebtunis papyri.

Mummy catonnage in Tebtunis

"Literature from antiquity usually tells us about elites," says Todd Hickey, curater at the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri. "The papyri give us evidence about other strata of society. Not the poorest of the poor, certainly, but a much wider range of people than we'd know about if we only had the classical authors to go on."

Hickey came to Berkeley last summer to care for the university's immense Tebtunis papyri collection. A trained papyrologist, he is skilled in the deciphering, translating and preserving such ancient material.

The Tebtunis papyri collection consists of approximately 30,000 pieces, excavated for Berkeley at the dawn of the last century. A sizable donation from philanthropist Phoebe Apperson Hearst enabled two British archeologists, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, to spend the first six months of 1900 in the vicinity of Umm el-Breigat, an Egyptian town known as to the ancient world as Tebtunis.They found papyrus fragments in the ruins of the town, in the papyrus-mâché coverings of human mummies and stuffed inside 1000 mummified crocodiles.

The collection was then sent to Oxford University in England where 1093 pieces -- approximately three percent of the total number -- were deciphered and published. In 1938, the papyri were finally shipped to Berkeley. They arrived still in the tin boxes from the excavation, inserted between acidic paper sheets of the Oxford Daily Gazette.

When Hickey came to Berkeley in the summer of 2001, many fragments were still lying in these original boxes. Some 21,000 waited in file folders, and others had been damaged by the well-intentioned work of Edmund Kase, Jr., a visiting papyrologist hired by Berkeley in 1940. "Kase used a 'space-age' material called Vinylite to mount the papyri," says Hickey, picking up a sheet of thick floppy plastic. "It hasn't served them well. You can see how flexible it is, and every time it flexes, little pieces of papyrus break off." The Vinylite also scratches easily and generates static electricity. Only a deionizer, invented by Berkeley engineers, has made it possible to open the mounts without damaging the papyri inside.

While the papyri languished in the vault for some years, the late 1960's and the 1970's brought a burst of renewed interest. A visiting papyrologist named Elbert Wall photographed 1705 of the fragments for the International Photographic Archive of Papyri, and former Berkeley classics professor James Keenan published the fourth volume of the Tebtunis papyri translation with his colleague John Shelton. Keenan and Shelton also transferred a number of the pieces from Vinylite to glass. But the 1980's and the early 1990's saw little activity in the vault above the Bancroft Library.

A birth notice, 50 AD

In 1994, Berkeley joined with Columbia, Princeton, Duke and the University of Michigan to found the Advanced Papyrological Information System, or APIS. This initiative has begun to put catalogue records and images of papyri on the world wide web for students and scholars to use. "In the past, if you needed to see a papyrus, you had to write and request a photograph," says Hickey. "There was a lot of waiting around if you wanted to check a text to test a hypothesis. Plus library photographs usually aren't cheap, and your hunch might be wrong. APIS has dramatically accelerated the pace of papyrological research."

Work on the APIS Project, funded by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, led to increased interest from the University's Classics, Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology and Near Eastern Studies departments. The Center for the Tebtunis Papyri was founded in October 2000. With support from the Vice Chancellor of Research, the Center was able to hire Hickey as a full-time papyrologist. He is based in the Bancroft library but is also teaching a graduate seminar in editing ancient texts.

"I was trained as an ancient historian, so first and foremost, I'm interested in synthesis," Hickey says. "Attention to textual detail is important, but so few papyrologists move beyond that. I'm also always preaching about the relevance of the papyri. Even if students are doing something on Asia Minor or Italy, I'm encouraging them to use this material from Egypt as a comparative data set. You just don't get such rich evidence elsewhere in the Hellenistic or Roman world."

The texts, which range from the 3rd century BC to the 4th century AD, consist of both literature and everyday writings. Accounts, contracts, wills and petitions lie alongside copied manuscripts of Homer.

One of the most important items is a section from the Inachos, a satyr play by Sophocles. "What's so special is that it's a play that was lost to us, that wasn't preserved by medieval manuscripts," says Hickey. "We're trying to tease more and more text out of these fragments because they're so precious." Another work, a Trojan War story previously known only in a Latin version, also surfaced. "The Latin text, Diary of the Trojan War (Dictys Cretensis' Ephemeris belli Troiani), served as one of the two main sources for medieval accounts of the Trojan War," says Hickey. "Some had argued that there was a Greek text underlying the medieval story. That turned up in the Tebtunis papyri as well."

But for Hickey, small glimpses into everyday life are just as important as pieces of great literature. One of his favorite texts for presentations is a note written in the labored hand of a slave woman. "She's very concerned that her owner knows she's done everything that was asked of her," he explains. "She's clearly anxious about this. Where else, outside this kind of collection, are you going to find an autograph letter of an ancient slave?"

The universality that comes through in pieces like these is something Hickey hopes to impress upon students, scholars and people everywhere. "There's a fundamental humanity here," he says. "When we read these, we encounter shared hopes and fears, joys and disappointments. Even though there are 2000 years separating us, we're very much the same."