THE DERVENI PAPYRUS (DIAGORAS OF MELOS, APOPYRGIZONTES LOGOI?): A NEW TRANSLATION RICHARD JANKO I. THE AIM AND OUTLOOK OF THE DERVENI AUTHOR HE DERVENI PAPYRUS, our oldest surviving Greek manuscript, was discovered in the remains of a funeral pyre1 almost forty years ago, in January 1962. Along with other bizarre and astounding material, it offers an allegorical interpretation of a cosmogonic poem ascribed to Orpheus. It is a text of capital importance for understanding the religious and philosophical crisis of the late fifth century B.C.E., when polytheism was challenged by monotheism and pantheism. The papyrus' final publication is still awaited, although the difficult and painstaking work of putting together the over 200 carbonized fragments, recovered by the use of static electricity, appears, according to what has been published, to be largely complete.2 Meanwhile, considerably more can be done to interpret what is already known of the papyrus, especially since the recent publication of a greatly improved text of its opening.3 The excellent supplements there offered prove that this text is a work of the sophistic enlightenment, by clarifying its attitude to mystery cult and traditional Greek religion in general.4 In offering a translation based on my own restorations of the original Greek, I shall argue three propositions, which are wholly independent of each other:
The three longest inscriptions from Methone, which all seem to be in Eretrian script, are an important testimony to the diffusion of literacy across the Mediterranean world. They help us to reconstruct the prehistory of the Greek alphabet, which according to internal evidence went through three phases, from the simplest ‘Cretan’ script to Euboean, Roman and ultimately Ionian. Yet the earliest alphabetic inscriptions seem to come from Gabii in Latium and Gordion in Phrygia, a fact which contradicts the internal evidence that Greeks adapted the Phoenician script. Consistency returns only if one accepts a recent proposal to raise the chronology of the Middle and Late Geometric periods. The finds from Methone confirm that Euboean script was already well adapted to the recording of complex texts such as epic poetry.
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