Papyrusmaterial aus Elephantine und seine signifikanten Merkmale

Decades of restorational processing of the writing surface, papyrus, have resulted in observations of detailed material structures that can vary depending on the production site. This paper presents characteristic traits of the papyrus material that comes from Elephantine manufactories. This material is clearly distinct from material from other places, for example Thebes, Illahun, and Tebtunis. The differences lie less in the various color nuances than in the papyruses’ general physical characteristics, fiber structure, and special surfaces. All visual observations and all simple measurements made so far have received support from natural-scientific investigations for quite some time now

Papyrus Berlin P 23724: eine ungewöhnliche Verkaufsurkunde aus Soknopaiu Nesos

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Looking for the missing link in the evolution of black inks

In the transition from carbon to iron-gall inks, the two documents from the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection in Berlin with shelfmarks P 13500 and P 13501 discussed in this work present an important case. Their inks appear brownish, although they date back to the fourth and third century BCE, when carbon inks are believed to have been commonly if not exclusively used. Using imaging micro-X-ray fluorescence and infrared reflectography, we discovered that the inks in both documents contain a significant amount of copper in addition to carbon. Comparing the extant recipes for black writing inks and the experimental evidence, we suggest that these inks are a transition between the pure carbon and the iron-gall inks. Such inks may have been quite common before the production of iron-gall ink was clearly understood and established

Mixed Inks in Two Coptic Documents from the Hermopolite Region Relating to Lease Business

In this article, we present two Coptic papyri, P 11934 and P 11935 from the Berlin collection excavated in Ashmunein (ancient Hermopolis) by Otto Rubensohn in 1906. We employ a multi-disciplinary approach that takes into account both their materiality – writing support as well as ink – and their content, as has become ‘best practice’. Material aspects of written documents have traditionally been the purview of papyrologists. Recently developed methods of scientific analysis generate sets of archaeometric data with the potential to improve understanding of the materiality of ancient document production, as well as to yield new evidence for genuine papyrological research questions. To achieve this, a large corpus of comparative data needs to be built. Our contribution offers a first step in this direction. We aim at presenting the papyri, which were selected because of the ink corrosion during conservation work at the Berlin collection, in a format that is exhaustive both for material and textual aspects. The inks from both papyri were analysed using a combination of techniques, contributing to our better understanding of the development of ink technology in Late Antiquity

An Attempt at a Systematic Study of Inks from Coptic Manuscripts

L'articolo intende prendere in esame, per la prima volta in modo sistematico, le componenti chimico-fisiche degli inchiostri utilizzati per i manoscritti copti, allo di tracciare prassi scribali di diverse aree di produzione libraria

The quest for the mixed inks

This article attracts the attention of scholar and scientists on mixed inks obtained mixing carbon and tannins, with or without the addition of metallic salts. The difficulty in experimentally identify these inks using non-invasive techniques are discussed