Minutes of Proceedings. 209 



■especially considering how sharply the bureaucracy looked after taxa- 

 tion, which is necessarily associated with property ? And is it not 

 possible that at that late date other materials, not of the same nature — 

 for example, some literary papers — may have got mixed with business 

 documents of the time of the Second and Third Ptolemies ? I do not 

 assert that this happened at Gurob ; only that it is not a conclusive 

 argument that, because classical texts are found mixed with the 

 official papers, they cannot be younger than 220 e.g. The antiquity 

 of any piece must, in the absence of a date, be judged by the character 

 of the writing. 



This brings me to what I consider the greatest value which 

 attaches to Mr Petrie's discovery — I mean its bearing on Palaeography. 

 To see what an important contribution it has made to our knowledge 

 in this branch of study, it is only necessary to look into the excellent 

 little book on Greek and Latin Palaeography recently published by the 

 principal Librarian of the British Museum, We have, in this Gurob 

 find, a large body of dated documents of the third century b.c. 

 There are wills of the years 237, 235, and 224 b.c. ; the oldest 

 fragment — merely a scrap of text — belongs to 268 before our era. 

 Tliere are in the libraries of the world only a few Greek Papyri of 

 equal antiquity, such as the Imprecation of Artemisia at Vienna; so 

 that this find gives us almost the entire representation which we 

 possess of the earliest stage of Greek writing other than sculptured 

 inscriptions. It is, indeed, the study of the specimens handled by 

 Dr. Mahaffy, that has led to the acknowledgment of the great, though 

 not equal, antiquity of some papyri in the several European collections, 

 which had been formerly assigned to later periods. We find in these 

 Gurob remains, as elsewhere, two different kinds of writing. There 

 is, first, the formal literary hand, ordinarily used by professional 

 scribes in preparing books for the market, though sometimes employed 

 for ordinary uses ; and, secondly, the cursive hand, generally applied 

 to every-day purposes, but occasionally used for literary ends by 

 scholars or other persons not writing for the book trade. Of the 

 former, the fragment of the Phado of Plato is a beautiful example, 

 and that of the Antiope one nearly, though not quite, as good ; and 

 the character of the letters used in them is believed, by the best judges, 

 to prove their early Ptolemaic origin. Of the second kind of writing 

 the business documents afford abundant specimens. Now, on a 



