Early papyrus ‘rewrites history’

Parchment, believed to contain oldest cartography of Greco-Roman era, to go on show in Turin

A section of the first-century-BC Papyrus of Artemidorus is shown in a photo released yesterday. The parchment was the work of an Egyptian copyist — who transcribed books by Greek geographer Artemidorus — and a painter who inserted drawings of maps.

By Marta Falconi - The Associated Press

ROME - It served first as a notebook for ancient painters and then as part of a mummy’s wrapping. Now, a first-century-BC parchment believed to contain the earliest cartography of the Greco-Roman era will be on display next month in the northern Italian city of Turin.

The Papyrus of Artemidorus tells a tale of more than 2,000 years of art and culture.

Egyptologist Alessandro Roccati, of the University of Turin, said the parchment was “extraordinary” in that it “conserves direct and ancient testimony that helps reconstruct history.” Roccati was not involved in the project.

The parchment’s story begins around the mid-first century BC, when a copyist in Alexandria, Egypt, began working on a blank parchment to copy the second of 11 books by Greek geographer Artemidorus of Ephesus.

“This papyrus is the most ancient geographic map of the classical world and helps write new pages of ancient history,” said Claudio Gallazzi, a professor of papyrology at the University of Milan, who has studied the parchment since the 1990s.

During the transcription, the copyist left room in the Greek text to insert drawings of maps, and later took it to a painter’s studio to have them drawn. Yet the painter designed only a partial map, which appears to be what Artemidorus believed was the shape of the southwestern Iberian peninsula.

“The painter must have drawn the wrong map and, as soon as he realized it, stopped (working),” said Gallazzi, who also directed the papyrus’s restoration. The map has no names and looks incomplete.

“He probably should have painted a generic map first, instead of a specific one. By then, the papyrus was ruined and it was useless to go on.”

A few years later, scholars in the studio began using the blank spaces on the nearly 3-meter-long (nearly 10-foot) parchment for rough drafts and to keep a catalog of drawings for clients.

The drawings include pictures of real animals, such as giraffes, tigers and pelicans, as well as mythical ones, such as the griffin, marine snake or a dog with wings, Gallazzi said.

He added that the drawings were used as a catalog for mosaics and frescos that the painters would offer to their customers. At least two scholars also used the papyrus for practice and drew heads, feet and hands until there were no blank spots left. “After using it for decades as a catalog, the papyrus was later... sold as pulp paper,” Gallazzi said.

The parchment surfaced again in the Nile Valley, where it was used as a wrapping for a mummy, lying in the ground for 1,800 years, Gallazzi said.

In the early 1900s, local excavators recovered and sold the wrapping — known as cartonnage — to an Egyptian collector who owned it for around 50 years. After passages around Europe, a German collector bought it, opened the cartonnage and recovered the fragments of the papyrus.

The parchment looks scrappy and has holes. But the papyrus held yet another surprise.

“At some point, somebody wet it. Where there are holes, the ink was stamped upside down on the other side of the parchment,” Gallazzi said. Because of that, even though parts of the paper were lost, the drawings on those parts were not.

The papyrus — which was bought by a foundation for 2,750,000 euros ($3,369,850) — will be put on display at Turin’s Bricherasio Palace starting February 8 for three months.

Organizers said they were planning to lend it to other museums in Europe and the United States before placing it at Turin’s Egyptian Museum.