Papyrology in Liège

1891-1948

The links between the University of Liege and papyrology are close and ancient. As early as 1891, Rector Louis Roersch (Maestricht, 1831 - Liège, 1891), ordinary professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, did he not refer, in his inaugural speech entitled The Constitution of Athens until the Establishment of Democracy, which he delivered in the academic hall on October 13, shortly before his death, to an Aristotelian work exclusively preserved on papyrus and published for a very short time (1) ? His colleagues and successors were not to be outdone.

Already, at the beginning of the century, the first in Belgium according to his biographers, Jean Pierre Waltzing (Frassem, near Arlon, 1857 - Liège, 1929), ordinary professor at the University of Liège, had understood the interest that the study of papyri offered for classical philologists (2). As early as 1901, he had welcomed in Le Musée Belge, a review of classical philology, of which he was the director, numerous contributions relating to papyrology (3) and, after having surrounded himself with a rich documentation, from 1903 to 1906, he had begun by making privatim a course of papyrology to the students of classical philology, before being charged, by a royal decree of May 25, 1906, taken on the opinion of the Faculty, of an optional course entitled, at his request, "History of the political and administrative institutions of Roman Egypt according to the papyri".

On October 16, 1926, he was discharged from this course at his request, while Nicolas Hohlwein (Liège, 1877 - Liège, 1962) (4), who was to be one of the founding members of the International Association of Papyrologists, was authorized to open at the University of Liège a free course of Greek papyrology (5), which he taught until his admission to emeritus in 1947. As Alfred Tomsin wrote (6), this pupil of Jean Pierre Waltzing, who had spent time in Berlin, Bonn, Heidelberg, Würzburg and Paris, had received "the essential part of his training from the renowned papyrologists of the time, whose courses he had followed in Germany and France as a travel grant holder during the years 1902 and 1903. Nicolas Hohlwein published numerous articles and several works, including La papyrologie, bibliographie raisonnée (Louvain, 1905), L'Egypte romaine (Brussels, 1912), which was awarded a prize by the Académie Royale de Belgique and published in his Mémoires, and Le stratège du nome (s. l., s. d. [1926], reproduced in the collection Papyrologica Bruxellensia, 9, 1969) (7). One of his students, Robert Cavenaile, was to publish the Corpus Papyrorum Latinarum in Wiesbaden in 1956.

1949-1970

From 1949 to 1953, it was Claire Préaux (Liège, 1904 - Brussels, 1979) (8), ordinary professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, who was in charge of the Greek papyrology course at the Université de Liège. There is no need here to retrace the prestigious career of the author of the monumental works L'économie royale des Lagides (Brussels, 1939) and Le monde hellénistique (I-II, Paris, 1978) (9), who counted Paul Mertens among his students. Claire Préaux was to return to the University of Liège during the academic year 1960-1961 when, as holder of the Francqui Chair in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, she gave a course on the continuities between classical Greece and Hellenistic Greece (10).

Claire Préaux was succeeded by Alfred Tomsin (Liège, 1899 - Liège, 1976), who taught the Papyrology course from 1953 to 1969, and the Practical Exercises in Papyrology from 1964 (11). It was in February 1954 that Paul Mertens and Philippe Derchain acquired in Cairo some papyrus fragments for the University of Liège. without doubt," wrote Alfred Tomsin, "these are not yet the texts that could one day form the collection of Papyri Leodienses; they are only humble pieces, lacerated, worn, of difficult reading, but they constitute nevertheless an excellent didactic material. They provide various types of writing, from the first century to the Byzantine period, the material goes from the luxury copy, on surprisingly thin and white papyrus, to the papyrus incorporated in a cartonnage, with traces of polychrome linear decorations; one papyrus was used on both sides; one of them gives a wheat account, another a Coptic text " (12). The latter, which preserves a documentary text of three lines perhaps dated to the fifth century, was to be edited by Paul Mertens in 1957 (13).

Later, it was the project to carry out a prosopography of Roman Egypt that led Alfred Tomsin, with the help of Etienne Evrard for the programs, to make the first attempts, pioneers for the time, at computer processing of Greek papyrological texts, using the new resources of the Laboratoire d'analyse statistique des langues anciennes (LASLA), created at the University of Liège on September 19, 1961 (14). Accompanied by a call for international collaboration, this project was presented in Milan, in September 1965, during the XIth Congress of the International Association of Papyrologists, at the end of which its general assembly approved unanimously a motion asking for the creation within its bosom of a Commission charged to study the organization of the mechanographic work applied to papyrology (15). Three years later, the XIIth Congress of Ann Arbor (Michigan) was the occasion to present a program of automatic edition of the Greek documentary papyri, with various types of indexes and a choice of concordances (16), while a booklet entitled Choix de papyrus grecs. Essai de traitement automatique (Liège, LASLA, 1968, 128 pp.), to which J. Bingen, A. Tomsin, A. Bodson, J. Denooz, J.C. Dupont and Et. Evrard. In 1971, at the XIIIth Congress of Marburg, A. Tomsin and J. Denooz envisaged the constitution of a series of general programs that would make it possible to question papyrological texts on any particular point (17). Subsequently, the research continued and gave rise to the publication of various works, in which former students of A. Tomsin participated (18), such as Paul Bolland, former Governor of the Province of Liège, and Jean A. Straus, who wrote numerous contributions on slavery in Greco-Roman Egypt, including L'achat et la vente des esclaves dans l'Egypte romaine (Munich-Leipzig, Saur, 2004 = ArchPF, Suppl. 14). Another of his students, Joseph van Haelst, is the author of the Catalogue des papyrus littéraires juifs et chrétiens (Paris, 1976). Shortly before his death, Alfred Tomsin had time to finalize the Berliner Leihgabe griechischer Papyri II. Aus dem Nachlass Ture Kaléns fortgeführt und in französicher Tracht herausgegegeben, which was published posthumously (Stockholm, 1977 = Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Studia Graeca Upsaliensia, 12). Moreover, it was Paul Mertens who, with the help of Odette Bouquiaux-Simon and Jean Straus, corrected the second proofs of the volume and made the indexes.

1971-1998

Paul Mertens was officially in charge of the papyrology course at the University of Liège from 1971 onwards, but, as early as 1961, he began to assemble there a unique collection of photographs of literary papyri (19). A few years later, in order to facilitate the location of the papyri in the second edition of R.A. Pack's catalog, The Greek and Latin Literary Texts from Greco-Roman Egypt (Ann Arbor, 1965), he made concordances (20), with the help of the computer resources of the LASLA of the University of Liege. He was naturally entrusted with the responsibility of elaborating the third edition of the Catalogue of Greek and Latin literary papyri at the XIVth International Congress of Papyrologists, in Oxford, in 1974 (21), and, at the XVth Congress in Brussels, the University of Liège welcomed the papyrologists for a half-day session, on Tuesday, August 30, 1977.

To exploit the papyrological sources, the papyrology seminar of the University of Liège was undoubtedly the ideal research center, since Paul Mertens and his team worked on updating this magnum opus, constituting a magnificent library of papyrus editions, reviews and related literature, elaborating or completing a descriptive card for each literary papyrus and continuously enriching the photographic archives. It is on the basis of the resources thus gathered that works such as those of Robert Halleux on the chemical papyri of Leiden and Stockholm (22), of Bruno Rochette on the bilingual papyri (23) and of Marie-Hélène Marganne on the Greek papyri of medicine (24)could be carried out. This rich documentation also attracted to Liege many Belgian and foreign researchers, among whom A. Carlini, of Pisa, for the Corpus dei papiri filosofici greci e latini(25), M. Manfredi, of Florence, for the Corpus dei papiri greci di medicina, R. Cribiore, of New York, for the scholastic papyrus, R. Otranto, of Bari, for the catalogs of books preserved on papyrus, G. Cavallo, of Rome, for the history of the Greek writing, A. Blanchard, of Paris, for the formats of Ptolemaic rolls, J.-L. Fournet, of Strasbourg, for the papyri of Dioscore of Aphroditè, A. Wouters and G. Schepens, of Louvain, for the supplements to the Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker(26), L. Rafaelli, of Pisa, for the Homerica, L. Savignago, of Padova, for the papyri of Euripides, W. Brashear, of Berlin, and many others..

In order to identify, group and reclassify papyri that were previously unpublished or unidentified, CEDOPAL acquired the Ibycus Scholarly Computer System, an invention of David W. Packard, which allows the exploitation of the CD-ROM of the T(hesaurus) L(inguae) G(raecae), which has been prepared since 1971 at the University of California, Irvine, by Professor Theodore F. Brunner and his team. The intensive use of this magnificent instrument, with the handling of which Odette Bouquiaux had familiarized herself in Pisa, then in London, in 1987 and 1988, allowed her to make a number of new identifications (27), some of which, still unpublished, are recorded in the Mertens-Pack3.

On the other hand, the celebration of the 175th anniversary of the University of Liège was the occasion for the director of CEDOPAL to organize an exhibition on " The World of Books in Classical Antiquity " in the Salle Marie Delcourt of the Bibliothèque générale, from March 1 to 31, 1993. With some modifications, and a Dutch translation, this exhibition was also presented at the Bibliothèque Royale Albert I de Bruxelles in February-March 1995 and at the Bibliothèque universitaire de Louvain in September-October 1996 and 2004 (28). Other exhibitions requested the assistance of the CEDOPAL: " From papyrus to the computer " (Pepinster, September 1992), " The paper and the book " (Visé, November 1996, with a conference of J.A. Straus entitled " Le papyrus, papier de l'antiquité "), " Du papyrus au livre et à Internet " (Liège, Palais des Princes-Evêques, September 1997), " Médecine et société en Grèce antique " (Musée Royal de Mariemont, September-December 1998) for Greek medical papyri, and " Les Empereurs du Nil " (Tongres, Musée Gallo-romain, September 1999-February 2000; Valenciennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts, March-June 2000; Lyon, Musée de la Civilisation Gallo-Romaine, June-November 2000; Amsterdam, Musée Allard Pierson, December 2000-March 2001) for the "literature" section (29). A video-film was produced(Le monde des livres dans l'Antiquité classique, Liège, 1993) and a brochure was published. Entitled La Bibliothèque d'Alexandrie et l'histoire des textes (Liège, CEDOPAL, 1992), it reproduced the text of a conference that Professor Luciano Canfora had given at the University of Liège in the fall of 1990.