Identificación y evaluación de los segmentos de mercado

The preceding sections have been about ways in which our documentation with papyri is fragmentary, in two senses: only some types of activity were ever documented at all, and much of

what was has not survived. Even what does survive, however, is also often fragmentary, and something needs to be said about the use of fragmentary texts.²⁸

Editors generally present restored texts, in which they supply as much of the missing text as they can; by convention, such text is enclosed inside square brackets: [lost letters]. Such restorations in general depend on a two-part analysis, although the process may be so rapid at times—especially with a lightly damaged papyrus and an experienced editor—that the editor is not conscious of the stages. The first stage is the analysis of what survives. Often, it is immediately clear, if the damage is not too great or diagnostic phrases survive, what kind of text we are dealing with. If it is not so clear, a rigorous analysis of the vocabulary or other formal characteristics of the surviving part will often allow the editor to discover what it is. The second stage comes in finding parallels, examining texts of the same kind. These two aspects are, naturally, iterative rather than entirely sequential.

Very straightforward, formulaic texts often yield in their entirety to this approach; tax receipts are perhaps the most straightforward example. In other instances, standardization of elements is relatively high, but there is considerable variation in their order, extent of abbreviations, and precise phrasing, particularly from place to place and time to time. This is the case with land leases. Here a more exacting analysis of the remains is necessary in order to establish the syntax and flow of thought through the document. Such a restoration may be somewhat less complete than that of a tax receipt, but as in absolutely standard texts the major problems lie in such contingent information as names and numbers.

As documents become less standard, the task becomes harder.

In petitions, for example, similar stories are told somewhat differently from case to case, even from draft to draft of the same petition. Here the editor’s task moves increasingly away from the mechanical use of parallels and into the attempt to understand the text on its own terms, borrowing phrases where appropriate, seeking to figure out what parts of a construction are missing, and in effect trying to become a member of the writer’s time and culture.

At the extreme end of the scale, documents that are not at all standard often cannot be restored at all once their damage exceeds narrow limits—cannot be restored, that is, with any confidence that one is actually reproducing the original language or even thought. Editors and critics often succumb to the temptation to rewrite the lost text, but that must be viewed as an exercise in prose composition, not as restoration, and the historian uses such reinvented texts at his or her peril.

A still larger problem must be kept in mind by the user of papyrus texts: restorations represent to a large extent an exercise in circularity. Editors can restore with confidence in a document only what they already know, either from the remains on the papyrus, or from parallels. The act of restoration does not usually add to the store of knowledge;²⁹ it is the arguments underpinning a restoration that bring new knowledge. What cannot be restored, conversely, is precisely what was unique—the number of artabas of wheat to be paid in rent each year, the names of the parties to an agreement, the identity of a person complained against, and so on.The significance of this logical difficulty lies in the use made of texts by subsequent readers. Anything put on the page as a restoration is almost certain to wind up being used by some later scholar or, just as bad, the presence of restoration will lead to the entire text’s being discounted. Considerable caution is therefore required of the editor, and the “purely illustrative” or “exempli gratia” restorations beloved of editors belong in the notes, where they can be read for what they are, not in the text. Often enough, texts are reprinted, whether in the original or in translation, in subsequent collections, usually stripped of the accompanying notes where cautions are raised or the reliability of restorations carefully assessed.

From this perspective, restorations are mainly a device for presenting an analysis and interpretation of a text in a readily usable fashion; a continuous text is, after all, far more readable than a block of discontinuous words and a mass of notes. A translation of such a restored text is similarly a device of presentation, a means of clarifying an interpretation. But the historian who would use such texts must always keep in mind that restorations are a form of presentation of an argument, not simply another form of primary evidence messed up with some funny brackets.

Particular and general

It will be evident from the varied circumstances in which papyri have survived and been edited that they reach the scholar and student with a great diversity of immediate contexts. At one extreme, a papyrus may be acquired in isolation through the antiquities market, with no associated information about where it was found or with what other texts. At the other, a papyrus may be found as part of a group in a controlled excavation or at least be identifiable as a member of an assemblage of papyri.

(Papyrologists often refer to such assemblages loosely as

“archives,” not necessarily meaning to ascribe to them either an official capacity or even any ancient physical unity.¹)

The task of the historian in using papyri is clearly conditioned to a large extent by these circumstances. In an extreme case the author and recipient of a text may be unknown, and the conditions under which it was drawn up a matter of conjecture.

Or all of the persons may be well known, along with their family connections, material circumstances, and the context of writing.

These differing cases impose different tasks on the historian. The purpose of this chapter is to show several instances of the scholar’s response to the challenge offered by a papyrus or group of papyri. In the first section we will look at two papyri lacking an obvious context, from which historians have managed to extract a great deal; the first of these is in fact close to the first of the extremes described above. With them I discuss a text forming part of an archive but the subject of important study from a viewpoint outside that archive and a foray into massive tax rolls for a purpose very different from the usual. A second section will consider various ways in which clusters or assemblages of documents allow rich and informative analysis. The third section will speak briefly—because the question will occupy us again in various forms in later chapters—of the process of synthesizing scattered bits of information; in the fourth we will look at the ways in which absent papyrological information can be replaced by other types of evidence.