volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

i4§ A Fragment of the Aristotle Papyrus Missing.
trajislation by Kenyon. As he progressed with the
work he found that a large piece of one of the rolls was
missing, and I was asked if I could account for it, and
whether it might possibly be in the hands of some
native in Egypt. Ultimately I was instructed to go to
Eg5^t on my way to Mesopotamia and to spare neither
trouble nor expense in finding the missing piece of the
papyrus, and I forthwith wrote to friends in Egypt
asking them to institute a search at once. Meanwhile
the report of Kenyon's great literary discovery spread
abroad and, naturally enough, aroused universal interest.
At the same time some gentlemen, who for one reason
or another generally betook themselves to Egypt for
the winter, claimed to have seen the papyrus in Egypt
and to have identified the Greek text on its back as
the lost work of Aristotle on the Constitution of Athens.
Others claimed to have discovered the papyrus themselves
and to have sold it to natives who sold it to
me, and more than one archaeologist told me personally
that the Trustees acquired it from him. I therefore
take this opportunity of saying how the rolls of papyri
came into my hands.
I was travelling to Asyut with the Rev. Chauncey
Murch in December, 1888, by slow trains and easy
stages so that I might be able to go to various villages
in Upper Egypt and examine objects which natives
wished to sell. Among other places we stopped at
Malawi, about 185 miles from Cairo, and as we arrived
at two o'clock in the morning we gratefully accepted the
hospitality of some Coptic friends of Murch for the rest
of the night. Early in the morning various natives
brought us antiquities, chiefly Coptic, and some of these
' The official description of the papyrus is as follows : Papyrus
CXXXI. Redo. Accompt-book of Didymus, son of Aspasius, farm
bailiff to Epimachus, son of Polydeuces, in the neighbourhood of
Hermopolis, giving his receipts and expenditure for the nth year of
the Emperor Vespasian (a.d. 78-79), 3 rolls, 7 ft. 2J in., 5 ft. 5 in.,
3 ft. II in. Verso 'kOrfvalwv Trohreia. Late first or early second
century. See Greek Papyri in the British Museum, p. 166 if., and
Kenyon, Aristotle on the Constitution of Athens, 3rd edit., 1892.