Year: Day to Day Men: January 15

Southern Edge of the Lake

On the fifteenth of January in 1962, the Derveni papyrus was found at a site in Derveni, Macedonia, northern Greece. Discovered among the remnants of a funeral pyre in the necropolis that belonged to the ancient city of Lete, it is the oldest surviving manuscript in the Western tradition and possibly the oldest surviving papyrus written in Greek regardless of provenance. 

The papyrus dates to approximately 340 BC, making it Europe’s oldest surviving manuscript. Composed near the end of the fifth-century BC, its text is a mix of dialects, mainly Attic and Ionic Greek with a few Doric forms. Occasionally the same word appears written in different dialectic forms.

The content of the Derveni papyrus is divided between religious instructions on sacrifices to gods and souls, and an allegorical commentary of a genealogical poem of the gods, ascribed to Orpheus. The identification of the papyrus’s author is a matter of  dispute among scholars. Names like Euthyphron of Prospalta, Diagoras  of Melos, and Stesimbrotus of Thasos have been proposed with varying degrees of likelihood.

The reconstruction of the papyrus involved the exacting job of unrolling and separating the layers of the charred papyrus roll. The surviving two hundred and sixty-six fragments of the papyrus were conserved under glass in descending order of size; however, due to the existence of unplaced smaller fragments, reconstruction is exceptionally challenging. Modern multispectral imaging techniques were used to take digital microphotographs of the papyrus fragments. From this work, twenty-six columns of text were recovered, all with their bottom parts missing, as they had perished on the pyre.

The Derveni papyrus is now included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, a compendium of the world’s documentary heritage, such as manuscripts, oral traditions, audio-visual materials and library and archive holdings. The papyrus is noted in this register as being the oldest known European book.

Note: The Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC is the location of the Interdisciplinary Research Project for the Derveni Papyrus. Over the last forty-five years, the text of the papyrus has undergone extensive reconstruction and study. Among the leaders of the Imouseion Project have been Theokritos Kouremenos, George M. Parássoglou, and Kyriakos Tsantsanoglou. A user-friendly copy of the latest reconstruction of the papyrus is now available online at: https://chs.harvard.edu/derveni-papyrus-introduction/

An extensive and informative review written by Patricia Curd of Purdue University on the 2004 publication “The Derveni Papyrus: Cosmology, Theology and Interpretation” written by Hungarian academic Gábor Betegh, the eighth Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge University, can be found in the University of Notre Dame’s “Philosophical Reviews” located at: https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-derveni-papyrus-cosmology-theology-and-interpretation/