The Leyden papyrus X (P. Leyden X) is a papyrus codex written in Greek at about the end of the 3rd century A.D. [1] or perhaps around 250 A.D. and buried with its owner, [2] and today preserved at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
The Leyden papyrus X (P. Leyden X) is a papyrus codex written in Greek at about the end of the 3rd century A.D. [1] or perhaps around 250 A.D. and buried with its owner, [2] and today preserved at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
The Leiden papyrus was discovered at Thebes in Egypt, together with the Stockholm Papyrus, which was probably written by the same scribe, [3] and many Greek magical papyri, in the early 19th century by an adventurer calling himself Jean d'Anastasi, holding the office of Swedish vice-consul in Alexandria. In 1828 he sold a number of papyri to the Dutch government, which were lodged at the Leiden University Library, and labelled alphabetically from A to Z.
The papyri were first published and translated into Latin by Conrad Leemans in 1885 (Papyri graeci musei antiquarii publici Lugduni Batavi). Papyri A to U relate to matters concerning Ancient Egyptian law. Papyri V, W and X deal with alchemy.
The related Stockholm papyrus was found together with these, and Anastasy donated it to Sweden in 1832. It was first published by Otto Lagercrantz in 1913 (Papyrus Graecus Holmiensis). Whereas the Leiden papyrus X deals with metallurgy, the Stockholm papyrus deals with gems, pearls and textile dyeing. [4]
Papyrus V contains a recipe for a mystical ink made of misy (oxidized pyrite ores, a mix of copper and iron sulfates), green vitriol, oak apple, gum, and of a substance composed of 7 perfumes and 7 flowers. It has a recipe for purifying gold with cement royal. It gives a list of 37 secret names of plants, invented by holy scribes, containing code names such as "snake's blood", "rat's tail", and "lion's semen". Traces of this nomenclature survive in botanical names, like in German "Löwenzahn" (dandelion: lion's tooth) and wolf's milk; also in dragon's blood, which probably still denotes the same resin as in ancient times. Some of these aliases are given by Dioscorides, but with different meanings. [5]
Papyrus W contains magical invocations and Judaeo-Gnostic content. The 7 perfumes are given as: styrax dedicated to Saturn, malabathrum to Jupiter, costus to Mars, frankincense to the Sun, nard to Venus, cassia to Hermes, myrrh to the Moon. The 7 flowers are: nard, marjoram, lily, lotus, buttercup, narcissus, white violet. [5]
The papyrus consists of 10 leaves, 30 x 34 cm in size, folded lengthwise and making 20 pages, of which 16 contain writing. Each page has 28-47 lines. The text contains one hundred and eleven recipes for extracting precious metals, or counterfeiting such metals, or precious stones and purple dye. It also contains details of the manufacture of textiles, and making gold and silver inks. The recipes are not detailed, and probably served as a memory aid for those already familiar with the process. The presentation is exclusively practical, and does not include the usual alchemical or philosophical elements. The last eleven recipes are simply short extracts from the Materia Medica of Pedanius Dioscorides. They are chiefly descriptions of certain minerals.
The Leiden papyrus X quotes Dioscorides without spurious additions that may have been introduced by later scribes. For example, Kurt Sprengel's edition of De materia medica writes that mercury is stored in glass, leaden, tin and silver vessels. While it is true that glass is unaffected by mercury, all the metals named are attacked, and Zosimus takes special care in pointing that out. The Dioscorides extract in the Leiden papyrus X recommends only glass for storing mercury. [5]
The Elephantine Papyri and Ostraca consist of thousands of documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Aswan, which yielded hundreds of papyri and ostraca in hieratic and demotic Egyptian, Aramaic, Koine Greek, Latin and Coptic, spanning a period of 100 years in the 5th to 4th centuries BCE. The documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives, and are thus an invaluable source of knowledge for scholars of varied disciplines such as epistolography, law, society, religion, language and onomastics. The Elephantine documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives: divorce documents, the manumission of slaves, and other business. The dry soil of Upper Egypt preserved the documents.
Vitriol is the general chemical name encompassing a class of chemical compound comprising sulfates of certain metals – originally, iron or copper. Those mineral substances were distinguished by their color, such as green vitriol for hydrated iron(II) sulfate and blue vitriol for hydrated copper(II) sulfate.
The Rylands Library Papyrus P52, also known as the St John's fragment and with an accession reference of Papyrus Rylands Greek 457, is a fragment from a papyrus codex, measuring only 3.5 by 2.5 inches at its widest, and conserved with the Rylands Papyri at the John Rylands University Library Manchester, UK. The front (recto) contains parts of seven lines from the Gospel of John 18:31–33, in Greek, and the back (verso) contains parts of seven lines from verses 37–38. Since 2007, the papyrus has been on permanent display in the library's Deansgate building.
Papyrus 46, designated by siglum 𝔓46, is an early Greek New Testament manuscript written on papyrus, and is one of the manuscripts comprising the Chester Beatty Papyri. Manuscripts among the Chester Beatty Papyri have had several provenances associated with them, the most likely being the Faiyum. It has been paleographically dated between 175 and 225, or early 3rd century CE. It contains verses from the Pauline Epistles of Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Hebrews. Some leaves are part of the Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, and others are in the University of Michigan Papyrus Collection.
Ancient Egyptian mathematics is the mathematics that was developed and used in Ancient Egypt c. 3000 to c. 300 BCE, from the Old Kingdom of Egypt until roughly the beginning of Hellenistic Egypt. The ancient Egyptians utilized a numeral system for counting and solving written mathematical problems, often involving multiplication and fractions. Evidence for Egyptian mathematics is limited to a scarce amount of surviving sources written on papyrus. From these texts it is known that ancient Egyptians understood concepts of geometry, such as determining the surface area and volume of three-dimensional shapes useful for architectural engineering, and algebra, such as the false position method and quadratic equations.
The medicine of the ancient Egyptians is some of the oldest documented. From the beginnings of the civilization in the late fourth millennium BC until the Persian invasion of 525 BC, Egyptian medical practice went largely unchanged and included simple non-invasive surgery, setting of bones, dentistry, and an extensive set of pharmacopoeia. Egyptian medical thought influenced later traditions, including the Greeks.
Pseudo-Apuleius is the name given in modern scholarship to the author of a 4th-century herbal known as Pseudo-Apuleius Herbarius or Herbarium Apuleii Platonici. The author of the text apparently wished readers to think that it was by Apuleius of Madaura (124–170 CE), the Roman poet and philosopher, but modern scholars do not believe this attribution. Little or nothing else is known of Pseudo-Apuleius apart from this.
Papyrus Anastasi I is an ancient Egyptian papyrus containing a satirical text used for the training of scribes during the Ramesside Period. One scribe, an army scribe, Hori, writes to his fellow scribe, Amenemope, in such a way as to ridicule the irresponsible and second-rate nature of Amenemope's work. The papyrus was originally purchased from Giovanni Anastasi in 1839.
The Greek Magical Papyri is the name given by scholars to a body of papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt, written mostly in ancient Greek, which each contain a number of magical spells, formulae, hymns, and rituals. The materials in the papyri date from the 100s BCE to the 400s CE. The manuscripts came to light through the antiquities trade, from the 1700s onward. One of the best known of these texts is the Mithras Liturgy.
Papyrus 66 is a near complete codex of the Gospel of John, and part of the collection known as the Bodmer Papyri.
A planet symbol or planetary symbol is a graphical symbol used in astrology and astronomy to represent a classical planet or one of the modern planets. The symbols were also used in alchemy to represent the metals associated with the planets, and in calendars for their associated days. The use of these symbols derives from Classical Greco-Roman astronomy, though their current shapes are a development of the 16th century.
A biblical manuscript is any handwritten copy of a portion of the text of the Bible. Biblical manuscripts vary in size from tiny scrolls containing individual verses of the Jewish scriptures to huge polyglot codices containing both the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and the New Testament, as well as extracanonical works.
Papyrus 4 is an early New Testament papyrus of the Gospel of Luke in Greek. Opinions differ as to its age. It has been dated anywhere from the late second century to the fourth century.
Pseudo-Democritus is the name used by scholars for the anonymous authors of a number of Greek writings that were falsely attributed to the pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus (c. 460–370 BC).
The mappae clavicula is a medieval Latin text containing manufacturing recipes for crafts materials, including for metals, glass, mosaics, and dyes and tints for materials. The information and style in the recipes is very terse. Each recipe consists of the names of the ingredients and typically about two sentences on combining the ingredients together. A small minority of the recipes go to about six sentences. The text comes with a short preamble, and other than that it is just recipes. The number of recipes was expanded over the course of the medieval centuries, and some medieval copies have deletions as well as additions, so it is better thought of as a family of texts with a largely common core, not a single text. Most of the Mappae Clavicula recipes are also in medieval Latin in a text known as the Compositiones ad Tingenda.
Dr. Willem Pleyte was a Dutch Egyptologist and museum director.
Papyrus 967 is a 3rd-century CE biblical manuscript, discovered in 1931. It is notable for containing fragments of the original Septuagint text of the Book of Daniel, which was completely superseded by a revised text by the end of the 4th century and elsewhere survives only in Syriac translation and in Codex Chisianus 88. The manuscript is also important for early variants, both in the text of the Book of Ezekiel and of the Book of Daniel.
Annie Bélis is a French archaeologist, philologist, papyrologist and musician. She is a research director at the French CNRS, specialized in music from classical antiquity, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome.
Chrysocolla, also known as "goldsmith's solder" and "solder of Macedonia" (Pseudo-Democritus), denotes:
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