volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

350 Difficulty with the Owner of the Papyrus.
kind which I saw before me. I therefore made a selection
from the mummies and every class of funerary objects,
including the painted plaster figures described above,
and had boxes made for them at once, and packed them
up and carried them off with me.^
On my return to Cairo I found a letter from the
Principal Librarian, instructing me to " secure the
Greek papyrus," of which I have already spoken, and
I gathered from the remarks which followed that the
text had been identified, and that it was of great importance.
I set out without delay for the village where the
owner of the papyrus lived, but when I found him, and
wanted to settle the business with him, I learned that,
during my absence in Upper Egypt, the matter had
become unpleasantly compUcated in this way. Before
he brought the papyrus to me he sent a fragment with
a few lines of text on it to a friend in Cairo, and asked
him to show it to some of the English visitors there who
were known to be interested in such things, and to
ascertain if the papyrus was of great value or not. This
friend took the fragment to an official of the Service of
Antiquities, who quickly made out that it was a lost
poem by an ancient Greek author, and he at once took
steps officially with the view of finding out where the rest
of the papyrus was and where it had come from. The
fragment was then shown to an English professor, who
said the same thing as the official and went about
Cairo telling his friends that he had discovered a lost
Greek work. When the European dealers in Cairo heard
of the discovery they began to make inquiries among
the native dealers, but they gained no information from
them. The net result of all this was to enhance the
value of the papyrus in the mind of its owner, and he
bitterly regretted that he had not asked a higher price
for it. He managed to get it into his hands again in spite
of our agreement.
When I told him that I had come to pay the balance
^ See Guide to the First and Second Egyptian Rooms, p. 119 ff. (Nos.
29,584—29,589, etc.).