P. Leodienses conservation

If the Centre de Documentation de Papyrologie Littéraire of the University of Liège is known to papyrologists for its unique collection of 8,000 photographs of Greek and Latin literary papyri that they regularly come to consult or of which they often ask for one or the other copy, it has nevertheless possessed, for the last 50 years, a small collection of authentic papyri, mostly Greek, coming from Egypt. This collection allows visitors, whether they are students, schoolchildren, researchers or simple amateurs, to have a direct contact with texts written 2000 years ago for the oldest and fourteen centuries for the most recent.

The CEDOPAL papyri were purchased in Cairo in February 1954 by Professor Paul Mertens to serve as teaching material for papyrology students. However, time and dust had taken its toll and the papyrus collection was in dire need of restoration: following successive moves, some frames had broken, with the migration of their contents to the edges. Some papyri had become soiled that it was almost impossible to decipher them. Others, extremely fragile, were beginning to tear.

To restore its small collection of papyri, CEDOPAL was able to count on the generous help of Italian specialists who, every year, carry out a papyrus restoration campaign at the Cairo Museum: Mario Capasso, Professor at the Università degli Studi di Lecce, in the south of Italy, and Director of its Centro di Studi Papirologici, and his assistant, Natascia Pellé, a researcher at the same university, who has already carried out a number of research stays at CEDOPAL.

Even before their edition, which we hope to publish in 2006, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the official opening of a papyrology course at the University of Liege, the restoration of the P. Leodienses, which took place during the last week of June 2004, brought substantial results and some beautiful discoveries:

• from ten entities at the beginning, the papyri have increased to a number of 20, thanks to the individualization of some fragments and the grouping of some others by the Italian team, which has a long experience in this field;
• on a papyrus, after cleaning of the surface, one discovered, in addition to a Greek text, of the demotic writing, which is an Egyptian cursive;
  three papyri carry, with the back, the same traces of colors and gypsum and could come from the same cardboard;
• while it has long been known at CEDOPAL that one of the papyri bears the title of Emperor Tiberius and most likely dates from his reign, between 14 and 37 CE, the removal of traces of gypsum from another has revealed a second imperial title from the first century;
• we have also observed accidents that occurred during the manufacture of papyrus, such as, on a document from the Byzantine period, the defect of a portion of the second layer of fibers, and, on the back of another document, the presence of a reinforcing strip glued on the front against the back, as early as antiquity, to consolidate a fragile part.

For more information

• Mario Capasso – Natascia Pellé, Il ristauro dei Papiri dell’Università di Liegi (Gli Album del Centro di Studi Papirologici dell’Università degli Studi di Lecce, 6), Napoli, 2008.
• Marie-Hélène Marganne, Papyrus et papyrologie à l’Université de Liège (Cahiers du CEDOPAL, 5), Liège, 2007.

CEDOPAL Papyri conservation

Explanatory video about the restoration of P. Leodienses