Скачать с ютуб The Oxyrhynchus Papyri | Early Christian Manuscripts в хорошем качестве

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri | Early Christian Manuscripts

The focus of the project is the publication of papyri from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Collection housed in the Sackler Library at Oxford. The collection comprises thousands of papyrus texts from ancient Oxyrhynchus and other sites in Egypt and is the largest collection of papyri in the world. It includes principally literary, documentary and other texts in Greek, dating from the third century BC to the seventh century AD, but also a few hundred texts each in Egyptian, Latin and Arabic, and a very few in Hebrew and Aramaic, Syriac an Pahlavi. https://www.classics.ox.ac.uk/oxyrhyn... The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of texts that were discovered at Oxyrhynchus (known today as el-Bahnasa), a site located in Upper Egypt. This group of documents is seen as one of the most important discoveries when it comes to manuscripts for a number of reasons. First, they have works of ancient literature that are not known to have survived anywhere else in the world. Additionally, there are many texts that provide an insight into everyday life in Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Furthermore, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri contains the largest cache of early Christian manuscripts discovered to date. Discovering the Papyri The Oxyrhynchus Papyri first came to light in the final years of the 19th century. In 1896, two British Egyptologists, Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt, chose to excavate at El-Bahnasa. One factor that influenced the two men to choose this city as their excavation site was its reputation as a key Christian center in ancient times. The two men were hoping that they would be able to find some interesting pieces of early Christian literature there. The collection consists of 12 papyrus volumes and fragments of another one. They contain a total of 52 separate texts, which make up 48 individual titles, as some works appear twice, in different codices. These texts are all written in Coptic Egyptian, though it is generally assumed that they were originally composed in Greek. Although the versions preserved in the Nag Hammadi codices were collected and written down sometime in the mid-fourth century, the original works must have been conceived during the first three centuries of the Christian era. The writings include noncanonical gospels, acts, letters, apocalypses, revelatory dialogs, and philosophical tractates. Although these illuminate ancient Judaism and early Christianity, they most importantly aid our understanding of Gnosticism, of which there were several schools. Generally, ancient Gnostics shared contempt for this physical world, which they accepted was created by the biblical God, but who they believed was a lower, jealous deity that resulted from a singular, higher, ultimate, transcendent deity. Understanding this—through a higher insight (gnosis, in Greek)—allowed one to liberate the transcendent divine spark trapped within the material world and imprisoned within the physical, human bodies of Gnostics, and let her return to the divine realm (i.e., achieve salvation). Modern interpretations of Gnosticism range from viewing it as a Christian sect to a religion in its own right to a movement transcending any single religion. Some scholars link the codices with early Egyptian monasticism, specifically the nearby Pachomian monastery at Faw Qibli—due to monastic documents used as stuffing inside the covers of two of the codices and ascetic overtones in several treatises.Imprecisely, the manuscripts are often referred to as a “Gnostic library,” but it is not obvious that they constituted a personal or institutional library, and the works they contain are not all Gnostic. For instance, a copy of Plato’s The Republic, edited to include some contemporary Gnostic concepts, was included among the writings. The Egypt Exploration Society is the custodian of the largest collection of ancient papyri in the world. Housed at the University of Oxford, the collection comprises over 500,000 fragments of literary and documentary texts dating from the third century BC to the seventh century AD. The texts are written in Greek, ancient Egyptian (hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic), Coptic, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Pahlavi. Most of the papyri come from the excavations of Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt (above) on behalf of the Graeco-Roman Branch of the Egypt Exploration Society between 1896 and 1907. During this time they conducted investigations at sites around the Faiyum, and most prominently at the site of Oxyrhynchus (Bahnasa). Other papyri come from the expedition of John de Monins Johnson to Antinoopolis in 1913-14. The Society also holds various records of the excavations and the distribution of the finds, including photographs taken by the Graeco-Roman Branch. https://www.ees.ac.uk/papyri