PAPYROLOGY. Papyrology means the science or study of papyri, but as commonly understood the scope of this study is narrowed on one side and widened on another. The papyri found in Egypt—which country, except for the charred rolls of Her culaneum, has hitherto been their only source—are written in a variety of scripts and languages : ancient Egyptian in its pro gressive stages of Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, Demotic and Coptic, in Hebrew and Aramaic, in Syriac, Persian and Arabic, as well as in Greek and Latin. Papyrology, however, and its foreign equivalents, Papyrologie, Papirologia, Papyrusforschung, etc., have come to be associated with papyri written in the two clas sical languages, especially Greek, which is far commoner than Latin, and limit themselves to the Graeco-Roman period of Egyptian history. On the death of Alexander the Great, who had occupied Egypt in 332 B.C., Ptolemy Soter I., the founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty, became satrap and subsequently king. Thence forward, till the Arab invasion in the middle of the seventh cen tury, Greek was the official language of the country. Under the earlier Ptolemies Greek-speaking settlers were introduced in con siderable numbers, and by degrees the Greek language and litera ture became so widely diffused and firmly rooted that their predominance remained unchallenged when Egypt was incorpo rated in the empire of Rome. Literary fragments in Latin are rare,
and for documentary purposes that language was little used except in military and legal business and in private correspondence between Roman officials themselves. After the Arab conquest Greek continued for a while to be officially employed side by side with Arabic, and then gradually died out. Greek, then, is the language with which the papyrologist is primarily concerned. He will not of course neglect the evidence derived from contemporary documents in Demotic, Coptic, or Arabic, but the decipherment and interpretation of oriental scripts are left to specialists in those tongues. Though thus circumscribed, however, on the one hand, on the other the term papyrology is somewhat loosely allowed to comprehend those analogous Greek or Latin texts which are found in Egypt inscribed on substances other than papyrus—parchment, leather, wood, bone, fragments of limestone, and especially broken pottery or ostraca, which were very often used for short receipts and similar purposes. Inscriptions on stone are excluded; these form the material Of the kindred science of epigraphy. The first professorship of papyrology was estab lished in 1908 at Oxford.