Derveni papyrus

• 1. Introduction

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  "Close the doors, you uninitiated," begins a poem attributed to Orpheus, quoted inside a scroll called the Derveni papyrus. Plato himself quoted that same line. The papyrus was pulled from a nobleman's tomb near Thessaloniki, carbonized by the very funeral pyre that should have destroyed it. Charred and blackened, it endured for centuries in ground where papyrus rarely survives, emerging as Europe's oldest known manuscript. Scholars have called it the most important textual find of the 20th century for understanding Greek religion, philosophy, and the origins of literary criticism. Who lit the fire that saved it, and why did the full text take decades to finally reach print?

• 2. Recovered From Ash

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  On the 15th of January 1962, Petros Themelis and Maria Siganidou recovered the papyrus's charred remains from ashes atop a tomb's stone slabs. The grave sat on the road linking Thessaloniki to Kavala, part of a rich necropolis serving the ancient city of Lete. Only the scroll's top portion survived; the rest had burned away in the pyre that consumed the tomb. Conservators carefully unrolled what remained and joined the pieces into 26 columns of continuous text. Today the papyrus survives as 266 separate fragments, conserved under glass in descending order of size; many of the smallest pieces remain unplaced. Reading it means fighting the material itself, since the ink is black and the surface behind it is black too. According to Martin Litchfield West, a papyrus found at Daphni may be roughly half a century older. Even so, the Derveni roll remains the only ancient papyrus ever discovered in Greece itself. The scroll now rests in the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, its text holding a commentary far stranger than the story of its own survival.

• 3. An Allegory Of The Gods

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  Orphic initiators used a hexameter poem, credited to Orpheus, inside the mystery cult of Dionysus. The papyrus preserves fragments of that poem alongside a commentary explaining what the verses truly mean. The poem, the commentator argues, is not meant literally. Orpheus, he says, 'did not intend to tell contentious riddles but rather great things in riddles.' In the theogony the poem describes, Nyx, the personification of Night, gives birth to Uranus, the Sky, who becomes the first king. Cronus later takes the kingship from Uranus, only to be succeeded in turn by Zeus, whose rule over the whole universe the poem celebrates. Zeus secures that power by hearing oracles from Nyx's sanctuary, who tells him 'all the oracles which afterwards he was to put into effect.' Near the end of the surviving text, Zeus rapes his own mother, Rhea, an act that in Orphic tradition leads to the birth of Demeter. The poem implies Zeus would then rape Demeter, producing Persephone, who marries Dionysus. That part of the story must have continued in a second, now lost, roll. The commentator treats even the poem's opening line, an instruction to 'put doors to their ears,' as proof of allegory. Orpheus, he argues, wrote only for listeners pure enough to grasp hidden meaning.

• 4. Furies And Magi

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  The earliest columns of the papyrus, the ones in the worst condition, describe rites meant to calm the Erinyes, the avenging Furies of Greek myth. They also explain how to remove troublesome daimones and record beliefs held by the magi. Embedded among these fragments is a quotation from the philosopher Heraclitus. Scholars dispute even the basic order of these early fragments. Valeria Piano and Richard Janko have each proposed separate reconstructions of the sequence. Janko has also identified a quotation from the philosopher Parmenides among these same damaged columns.

• 5. A Patchwork Of Dialects

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  Attic and Ionic Greek dominate the papyrus's text, though a few Doric forms appear scattered through it as well. Sometimes the same word turns up in more than one dialectal shape. The word for 'small' appears as both smikro and mikro, an example linguists call s-mobile. The word for 'real' shows up as onta and eonta, and the pronoun for 'him,' 'her,' or 'it' appears as both nin and min. Untangling which dialect a scribe intended in each line has been one more obstacle for the scholars who spent decades transcribing the papyrus.

• 6. Reading The Unreadable

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  The full surviving text remained unpublished for 44 years after its discovery, even though three partial editions appeared in the meantime. In 2005, A. L. Pierris of the Institute for Philosophical Studies assembled a team to attempt a better edition. Dirk Obbink, director of Oxford's Oxyrhynchus Papyri project, joined the effort. Roger MacFarlane and Gene Ware of Brigham Young University brought multispectral imaging techniques to the effort. That initiative's results were never published or shared with other scholars. It was a team from Thessaloniki, led by Tsantsanoglou and colleagues, that finally published a complete text with photographs and translation in 2006. Valeria Piano and Richard Janko later made further progress using a new method for taking digital microphotographs of the papyrus. That technique let some of the hardest passages be read for the first time. Those images now sit in the public domain. A version of Janko's text appears in an edition by Mirjam Kotwick, while a full English edition is still being prepared.

• 7. Oldest Book In Europe

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  In 2015, UNESCO added the Derveni papyrus to its Memory of the World International Register, naming it the oldest known European book. It was the first item from Greece ever to receive that designation. UNESCO's description calls the papyrus immensely important for the study of Greek religion and philosophy, calling that study the basis for western philosophical thought. The same description credits the papyrus as proof of how early the Orphic poems date, offering what UNESCO calls 'a distinctive version of Presocratic philosophers.' UNESCO names the papyrus 'the first book of western tradition.' It says the text carries universal human values: the need to explain the world, and the desire to belong to a society with known rules. The register adds one more, in its own phrase, 'the agony to confront the end of life.' Yet the poem at the center of that book is older than the label suggests. It was composed near the end of the 5th century BC, decades before the commentary explaining it was ever written down.