Lewis on Papyrus Terminology: More on "Calamus" & "Kalamos"

Since my previous post about the kalameia plots in Egypt, I've been delving deeper into this topic, and one valuable resource that's been guiding my research is Naphtali Lewis's book Papyrus in Classical Antiquity. Despite being published in 1974, this book remains an incredibly useful resource on the topic. The reason I find Lewis's book so helpful is its wealth of technical terms and insights into the diverse terminologies used by ancient authors to describe papyrus and related plants. Understanding these terms is crucial for the question “How can we identify papyrus in the Oxyrhynchus documents?”

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Where did Oxyrhynchites get their Papyrus?

In 1898, a British archaeological team made a remarkable discovery—approximately 500,000 papyrus rolls, books, sheets, and fragments—buried in the sands around the town of El-Bahnasa in middle Egypt. These ancient documents, coming out of the site of the ancient Roman city of Oxyrhynchus, shed light on various aspects of life in Roman Egypt during the 2nd to 4th centuries CE. However, amidst this treasure trove of papyrus material, a perplexing mystery emerges—where did it all come from?

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