T
 

Papyrus Preservation
and Discovery at Columbia

LAWRENCE I. FEINBERG
 

y ]f ^HE Columbia papyrus inventory, one of the finest collec¬
tions in the United States, has been enlarged in its usable
size by nearly 50 percent as a result of an intensive preser¬
vation project which began on May 28, 1968, and ended on
January 5, 1969.

The expansion is due not to new acquisitions, but to the redis¬
covery and cataloging of more than two hundred fifty papyri and
vellum fragments of Egyptian origin, which, because of their un¬
usual contents, were never included in the regular inventory; they
had reposed in our vault for some 25 to 50 years. Nearly all the
newly cataloged pieces are either Coptic (late Egyptian, in Greek
characters, from the 5th to the loth century) or Arabic, in con¬
trast to the largely Greek documentary papyri and lirerary frag¬
ments which make up the rest of the collection.

The total inventory now consists of 754 numbers in series (553
previously) and about 50 Oxyrhynchus, Hibeh, and Fayum papyri
given to us by the Egypt Exploration Society in London. These
inventory numbers can be further broken down to more than
1,000 individual pieces. It has never been considered practical to
give each fragment a separate number, because purchases occa¬
sionally consisted of packets of 10, 20, or more pieces which were
often considered to be insignificant from a scholarly point of view.
These packets, however, frequently yield portions of ancient
Greek poetry and prose—which are always valuable—making the
purchase of many, for the sake of one or two, worthwJiile. There¬
fore the inventory numbers tend to reflect the number of signifi¬
cant pieces one may find in a collection.

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