![]() ![]() When these papyri have reappeared in modern times, they are often very fragmented and, in most cases, severely damaged. However, the immense majority of papyrological findings come from Egypt, because of the low soil humidity and because large areas in the desert were left undisturbed for centuries after many towns and cities were abandoned in late antiquity. Papyrus was for centuries the noblest writing material used in the Mediterranean basin. This is determining for the history of papyrology and its methods, since particularly at its beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, scholars were almost uniquely interested in recovering the texts, but not so much the objects, that had been long lost from antiquity. Unlike medieval codices and other written materials that in one form or another have been kept in libraries or archives, be it public or private, to the present day of their history, papyri are for their most part archaeological findings: they have come back to light after having been buried in the sand for centuries as the result of mere chance or excavations more or less methodologically conducted according to archaeological criteria. The possibilities offered by this knowledge when combined with that provided by the study and the analysis of the texts themselves in terms of their contextualization and interpretation has recently started to reveal itself to the papyrological community. Determining the composition of papers, parchments, papyrus and inks of ancient manuscripts has been one of the goals in museums, archives and libraries housing valuable documents for some decades. The results confirm previous findings in iron-gall ink distribution for texts written in bookhands from the Byzantine period, and adds to the characterisation of other groups, such as the Bawit one, with high levels of lignin in the composition of the writing surface, or the degradation of the cellulose shown for the Oxyrhynchus group, suggesting peculiar traits in the manufacturing and conservation of written documents from ancient times.Īpplication of elemental and molecular analytical techniques, especially those which are non-destructive, to studying materials related to cultural heritage has dramatically increased during the last few years. ![]() All samples have been analysed using infrared spectroscopy, and SEM/EDX has also been used for analysis of a small subset of sample in order to confirm the presence of iron, sulphur and other elements. ![]() The samples have been categorised into seven groups: Papyri that are (1) dated to II CE (2) dated to VI CE (3) from Oxyrhynchus (4) from the Monastery of Bawit (5) written in chancery hands (6) written in bookhands, and (7) brown ink. To this purpose, 67 samples of coherent groups of papyri from the Palau-Ribes collection in Barcelona, organised according to chronological, geographical and bibliological criteria, have been analysed to identify trends in their composition that may contribute to their characterisation and further enlarge our knowledge of written culture in Antiquity. This study, following previous research on ink characterisation of papyrus documents, uses infrared spectroscopy and SEM/EDX for the analysis of ink and the papyrus surface. Traditionally, papyrologists have only relied on the bibliological characterisation of the documents they work on to provide such a chronological, geographical and socio-cultural context within which to fully understand the texts they edit and study. Most of papyrus documents have reached us in a very fragmentary state due to their excavation conditions and, because of the early history of papyrology, without an archaeological contextualisation.
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