Dating Ancient Papyri | Hacker News Reader

Dating Ancient Papyri

larryhurtado.wordpress.com

38 pointsr0muald11 comments

Interesting, but with a few photos this would be even more interesting. (See for example the post from https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=medievalbooks.nl )

The reason that methods of papyri dating have become of interest lately is the controversy over the so-called "Jesus' Wife" fragment. The question of its authenticity is right in Hurtado's wheelhouse, so to speak, and he has addressed it in several posts:

https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/?s=wife

I'm still amazed at how such a blatant forgery was not called out more strongly, given the obvious flaws, not the least of which was its provenance from the same mystery source as another known fake.

I remember reading recently that humans started dating documents relatively late in history, and that even as late as in the Renaissance most people wouldn't have been aware of the current calendar year. [Ong 1982] Given that paleographists estimate how old ancient papyri are by means of dated documents I wonder:

Where these documents explicitly dated or are datings mostly extracted from the context (e.g., names of rulers / geographical references)? Are "documentary" papyri always reliable for comparisons?

In any case very interesting.

"But, as with all such judgement-activities, experts can disagree, often by several decades, even a century or so, and sometimes even more."

That sure escalated in a hurry! Decades... Century... More than a Century. Still, I get it, when the next best tool (radiocarbon dating) deals in millennia.

> "carbon-14 testing can’t really do more than offer a certain probability for a timeframe of approximately a century or so: about the same timeframe that palaeographers can offer"

The main takeaway is that the scale of both methods is essentially the same, and will rarely span more than 100 years, for the time frame of interest to papyrologists.

I find it oddly comforting that the most sophisticated dating techniques are no better than what amounts to academic consensus.

"Hmm… Yep, it's ancient."

Now that's a weird fetish. I obviously don't have anything meaningful to add to the discussion.

I wanted to say "Are ancient papyri fun to date?"

I can't personally see the appeal, but to each their own. I'd be more concerned with knowing how old the papyri is so that we can steer clear of any ancient laws regarding underage paper.

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