London seminar: 'A Tale of Two Cities': Ptolemaic Memphis and Roman Oxyrhynchus in papyrus texts
Event Info
Host: EES
Type: Education - Lecture
Time and Place
Start Time: Saturday, 17th July 2010, 11:00 am
End Time: Saturday, 17th July 2010, 4:00 pm
Location: The EES
Street: 3 Doughty Mews
City/Town: London WC1N 2PG
View Map
Contact Details
Email: contact@ees.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0)20 7242 1880
Link:
Description
The Society's excavations at Oxyrhynchus, the 'City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish', yielded a vast quantity of papyri which preserve texts of all kinds: everything from lost masterpieces of ancient Greek literature and important biblical texts, to tax returns, private letters and shopping lists (further information: http://www.ees.ac.uk/research/Oxyrhynchus%20Papyri.html).
This seminar will examine the written sources, showing how they can be used to shed light on the population that inhabited the great city of Memphis in Ptolemaic times and the Greek/Egyptian/Roman town of Oxyrhynchus under Roman rule. The processes of deciphering and understanding unpublished texts will also be explained. The seminar will be led by two of the most eminent scholars in the field:
Professor Peter Parsons, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University until his retirement in 2003. He is also an Editor of the Society's Graeco-Roman Memoirs (, and author of the award-winning City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Lives in Roman Egypt.
Dr Dorothy J. Thompson, a Fellow of Girton College and Bye-Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge, and author, with Willy Clarysse, of Counting the People in Hellenistic Egypt.