I am trying to find a way to keep track of papyri and parchments from Egypt appearing on the antiquities market. I have decided to start experimenting Pinterest, which is an easy platform for sharing images. There are a few inconveniences, e.g. the description field is limited to 500 characters and pins are just added chronologically without any possibility to organise an order of your own choice. However, I hope this would be a useful way to store images of manuscripts that otherwise risk to be lost. You probably remember how useful was to have Brice Jones’ old blog post to check the odd collection history of the Galatians 2 papyrus now in the Green/Museum of the Bible collection — if not check my old post A trip to Rome with a detour on eBay, and above all read the summary on what we have understood so far in my recently published article: “Papyri, Ethics, and Economics: A Biography of P.Oxy. 15.1780 (P 39)”, Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologysts, 52 (2015), 113-142.
The address of the Pinterest board is: https://uk.pinterest.com/facesandvoices/papyri/
As I explain in the board’s description, my aim is not that of revealing what the manuscripts contain, but to document the market “as it happens” so to say. As I have already said in an old post, very often the objects in question are far from interesting and mislabelled by dealers to inflate prices.
If you believe this is a good experiment and service, please drop me a message or an email if you know of any sale, and give me some feedback on how to improve the information collected. This is a work in progress!
Roberta Mazza 