P.Oxy. 1.119, a papyrus from Oxyrhynchus recording a letter from a young boy to his father. Papyrology helps to shed light on the lives of ordinary people in the ancient world.
My attention was drawn to papyrology when, despite all fuss about the (possibly false) Artemidorus Papyrus (AH 48), researchers still took the Gospel of the Wife of Jesus and the Sappho fragments seriously. The first of these notorious texts has turned out to be a forgery; about Sappho, even the retraction was a comedy. Because of these failures, the pieces I wrote about these papyri (in AH 46 and 49) were inevitably grim. I am disappointed, especially about the release of the Sappho fragments. Scholars who knowingly publish stolen data are willfully breaking academic codes of conduct.
Nevertheless, I ended my previous piece optimistically. Whatever the status of the Artemidorus Papyrus, genuine or false, the affair has been some kind of academic refresher course and has reminded classicists and other studentsthis improvement was insufficient to prevent the Sappho farce, the was debunked swiftly. Only Karen King, its discoverer and main victim, continued to believe in the authenticity of the fragment – and as we will see below, she has since rehabilitated herself.
