204 Royal Irish Academy. 



am not at all a specialist in that subject, particularly as regards writings 

 on Papyrus ; and in giving an account of Dr. Mahaffy's labours, I can 

 only bring to bear tbe general knowledge and babit of mind wbich. 

 may be expected in an ex-Professor of Grreek, and wbich may be 

 regarded as qualifying him for judging of the results of work which 

 he does not wish to imply that he could himself have performed. 



Let me briefly recall to you the circumstances in which the 

 investigation was undertaken. Mr. Flinders Petrie, well known as an 

 Egyptologist and explorer, discovered in the desert not far from 

 Gurob in the Fayyum, a cemetery partly of the Ptolemaic period. 

 Many of the mummy-cases in the tombs of this cemetery were made 

 of layers of papyrus, which had been cut or torn into small pieces and 

 glued together so as to form a thick carton. Mr. Petrie saw that the 

 pieces of papyrus were fragments of discarded documents, most of 

 them in Greek. To separate and cleanse them was a diificult, often 

 an impossible, task. Many were stained or worm-eaten so as to be 

 illegible, and a layer of chalk or lime laid over the papyri as a ground 

 for colouring had, in most cases, destroyed the ink. Mr. Petrie 

 brought home a large number of texts which he placed, in 1890, in the 

 hands of Dr. Mahaffy and Mr. Sayce for examination and decipher- 

 ment, if this should be found possible. Those scholars, working 

 under great difficulties, separated and sorted many of the fragments, 

 and laboured, not without success, on their interpretation. These 

 form the subject of the first part of the Memoir. Afterwards, on his 

 departure to Egypt in jNovember of the same year, Mr. Petrie left with 

 Dr. Mahafiy a store of unseparated fragments, which are printed and 

 discussed in the second part of the Memoir, dated 1893. In dealing 

 with the documents, Dr. Mahaffy liberally acknowledges such help as he 

 received from his colleagues in Trinity College ; but these gentlemen 

 would be the first to recognise that the work was essentially his own. 



Let me notice the several elements which composed this remark- 

 able find. When such a discovery is made, we of course ask, first, 

 whether it offers to us any literary compositions preserved in whole or 

 part ; and the recovery in recent years of several orations of Hypereides, 

 of the Aristotelian IIoXtTeta twv 'Kdiqvaiwv, and of the poems of 

 Herondas has awakened keen anticipation of similar successes to 

 follow. It soon appeared that among the Gui'ob papyri there were 

 several containing matter of this kind. There was, in the first place, 



