A second principal class of literary papyri consists of those representing works already extant. Of the Greek Bible there are numerous early fragments, and both for the Old and the New Testament the oldest manu scripts known are among the papyri. And they are not always mere fragments. From Egypt has lately come a well preserved book in the ancient binding containing a copy (on vellum), writ ten probably in the fifth century, of the four Gospels (edited by H. A. Sanders, 1912). This is known as the Freer manuscript, from the name of the purchaser, and is now in Washington. It differs from all others in the last chapter of St. Mark, where it gives a passage otherwise known only from a partial quotation in Latin by Jerome. Another Freer manuscript of considerable com pass, a papyrus book, perhaps of the early fourth century, con taining most of the Minor Prophets, was edited by the same scholar in 1927 along with a Berlin papyrus covering the greater part of Genesis and probably still earlier in date.
(b) Classical Authors.—Of the more familiar Greek classical writers not very many now remain quite unrepresented ; the Latin authors are comparatively rare, but fragments of Virgil, Cicero, Livy, Sallust, Gaius and other jurists have been recovered. Valu able textual evidence, often many centuries older than that which was previously available, has thus been obtained. Here again a general confirmation of tradition is a primary and satisfactory result. The papyri bring a certain number of minor improvements of reading, but prove that no serious deterioration occurred dur ing the middle ages, and that the classical texts have been handed down to us substantially as they stood in the first centuries of the Christian era. Secondly, the earlier papyri commonly show what has been termed an eclectic type of text, that is to say, they are seldom found to support at all consistently a single ms. or group of mss. but instead agree now with one, now another. An editor should therefore beware of attaching too much weight to one ms. or family; readings are to be judged on their own merits rather than on the general qualities of their source. Thirdly, the methods of the best modern scholarship have received from the papyri en couraging support.
The non-literary or documentary papyri naturally form an overwhelming proportion of the entire mass. A rough computation made at the end of 1927 put the total of published documents, including ostraca, in the neighbourhood of 12,00o, and large numbers which have been found have yet to be edited. The earliest dated Greek papyrus so far known is a
marriage-contract of the year 311 B.C., and each century from the third B.C. to the eighth A.D. is now more or less copiously repre sented. A documentary material is here presented which for ex tent and variety is unmatched in any other archaeological department. Considered according to their subject-matter these papyri fall into two main classes, the official and the private, each of them including numerous subordinate groups. Under the former head come copies of laws, rescripts, edicts, records of official acts, reports of judicial proceedings and other kinds of public business, correspondence, assessments and receipts of taxes, inventories, accounts and the like. In this class also are most conveniently placed documents which though emanating from private persons were addressed to officials, such as petitions, etc.
The historian may reap a rich harvest in several directions. For the Ptolemaic dynasty valuable evidence is forthcoming, and fresh light has also been thrown on the chronology of some of the Roman emperors. Other direct contributions to political history, though not frequent, are occasionally made; for instance, a recently published letter of the emperor Claudius to the people of Alexandria (H. I. Bell, Jews and Christians in Egypt, 1926), in which he states his views about the attribution to himself of divine honours, shows that at the be ginning of his reign, at any rate, Claudius was as much averse from extravagant pretensions as any of his predecessors. In an Oxyrhynchus papyrus, again, is preserved the proclamation which announced to the locality the decease of this same emperor, Claudius, and the accession of Nero.
But it is in the less prominent sphere of internal administration and economic, industrial and social conditions that the historical import of these business papers is especially striking. Here they are a prime source of informa tion; and their significance is by no means limited to Egypt, though of course local evidence must be applied with caution to other parts of the Graeco-Roman world. Sometimes individual documents may prove particularly instructive, as for instance the so-called Revenue Papyrus (edited by B. P. Grenfell, 1896), which reveals the highly complicated details of the working of an important State monopoly in the third century B.C. ; or a document of the same period from Hibeh, in which is exhibited the elabo rate organization of the official postal service.