In my last post, I introduced a project that I have in mind to study the reuse of papyrus manuscripts in ancient Egypt during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, and I linked to my initial map showing the locations of some reused papyri from some of the covers of the Nag Hammadi Codices. In this post, I want to say more about the overall project and about Tristmegistos.org, which among other things provides metadata for 209,616 ancient manuscripts.
So my big question is whether there was a wastepaper trade or not. I expect to be able to answer the question by finding or not finding patterns in the reuse of papyri. If most papyri were used and then reused in the same village or city or region, then it could be that people just reused what they had at hand or could pick up from the local dump. But if many or at least some papyri during the Ptolemaic and Romans periods were used in one place and then reused in another place more than a day’s walking/riding distance away, it would be hard to explain the movement without a wastepaper trade.
Besides distance, I also want to keep track of the amount of time between use and reuse, plus the kinds of papyri being reused, what were they reused for, and who was reusing them. It is not always possible to get at this information. But there is a lot of it on Trisgmesitos.org.
As I mentioned, Trismegistos provides metadata for over 200K ancient manuscripts. Here is the full list. If you open a record, you’ll see that there are three fields dealing with reuse: reuse type, reuse detail, reuse note. Not all ancient manuscripts were reused. I want to isolate those that were, and in particular the reused papyri. Among the search options on the site, it looks like the only way to do that is a Google Custom Search. (On the advanced search form, it is also possible to search the general ‘note’ field, but not the ‘reuse note’ field, and that does get at a bit of the information I want.) A Google Custom Search for ‘reuse’ turns up 26,300 results. That gives me an idea of the size of the data set, but the results are not very useful as far as I can tell. To click on each result and put the information into a CSV file would not be practical, to say the least.
The other week, Caleb McDaneil demonstrated how to use Python to go into a list of metadata records and pull out certain information. He demonstrated this on the text records at Internet Archive. But the process would be more or less the same for what I want to do with Trismegistos. Since I have not done anything like that before, it might take me a number of hours or even several days to complete the courses he recommended on The Programming Historian, and to write the program to do what I want to. Still it would be much more efficient than going through 26K Google results.
Once I have a CSV file, I could map the reused manuscripts on ArcGIS and (start to) answer my question.
Tags: wastepaper trade
What an interesting phenomenon to explore. When I worked on the Our Americas Archive Partnership, I came across a papal bull that had been reused to print Texas currency. Different time and place, certainly, but the trickiness of tracking reuse of writing materials remains. Later in the semester, one of the library’s programmers, Sid Byrd, will lead a session on programming. Hopefully that can get you on your way!
As I was reading your fascinating post, I was wondering how one might be able to analyze reuse data programmatically, so it seems like we’re thinking along similar lines. You might get in touch with the project team to let them know about your project and see about the possibility of getting access to the data; I bet they’d be eager to learn about your work.
Thanks for the comments and suggestions both!