From Cartonnages to Cultural Contexts

Abstract During his excavations in the Fayum, between 1900 and 1902, Pierre Jouguet was able to find a large number of mummy cartonnages, which along with documents of various sorts yielded some surprising, previously lost literary texts, such as Menander’s Sicyonians, Euripides’ Erechtheus, and Stesichorus’ Thebaid. The exact find-spot of the papyri is unclear: we know that the mummies were found in different necropoleis between Medinet Ghoran and Medinet en Nahas (ancient Magdola), but clear topographic information is largely missing: after reaching France, the cartonnages were dismantled in different steps over a span of several decades, so their ‘archival’ history is often difficult to trace. Nonetheless, even if their archaeological context is lost, the texts seem to point to common cultural contexts, as suggested by a comparison of their philological, palaeographic and ‘bibliological’ features. This article will survey such characteristics, in order to reflect on the readership and circulation of Greek literary texts in Ptolemaic Egypt.