City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Papyri Beneath the Egyptian Sand Reveal a Long-Lost World

Състояние: Много добро
Забележка: Почти отлично състояние - надписана дата на първа страница, неизползвана книга.
Издателство: Phoenix
Град на издаване: London
Наличност: singular
Ширина (мм): 135
Височина (мм): 215
Дебелина (мм): 24
Корици: Меки

Wonderful... expounded with all the intelligence, humanity, clarity and wit that have ever been the hallmarks of the finest scholarship’
Peter Jones, Literary Review

In 1897 two archaeologists began digging a series of sand-covered mounds south of Cairo. They turned out to be the rubbish dumps of a thriving city at the time of the Roman Empire inhabited by descendants of the Greek immigrants who had colonised Egypt after Alexander the Great’s conquest in 332 BC. Ten years later 500,000 fragments of papyrus had been uncovered.

The papyri were shipped back to Oxford and the task of deciphering them began. It is still going on today. These papyri are a unique treasure-trove in which lost masterpieces of Greek literature and fragments of censored Christian gospel rub shoulders with tax returns, private letters, wills and shopping lists. What the excavators had found was the entire life and culture of a flourishing market town. We hear the voices of beekeepers, donkey-drivers and wine merchants against the background of the crisis of the Roman Empire and the coming of Christianity.

‘So rich and so remarkable is the detail that a greed for more soon sets in’
Tom Holland, Guardian

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Peter Parsons was lecturer in Papyrology at Oxford University from i960 until 1989 and Regius Professor of Greek from 1989 until his retirement in 2003. He has been Fellow of the British Academy since 1977 and for many years he was head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project. He has been fascinated by the decoding of ancient papyri for more than half a century. He lives in Oxford.

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix
Timeline xi
Roman Emperors xv
Egyptian Months and Years xvii
Note on Sources xix
Glossary xxi
Preface xxv
Map xxx

Prologue i
1 Excavating Egypt 3
2 A Wealth of Garbage 12
3 Egyptian Greeks 31
4 'Glorious and Most Glorious City' 46
5 Lord and God 61
6 The River 81
7 Markets 102
8 Family and Friends 122
9 Poets and Pedants 137
10 Bureaucrats 159
11 Surviving 175
12 Christians and Christianities 193
Epilogue 211

Bibliography 217
Notes 227
Index 249

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