
Dating Ancient Papyri - r0muald
https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2016/06/24/dating-ancient-papyri/
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gus_massa
Interesting, but with a few photos this would be even more interesting. (See
for example the post from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=medievalbooks.nl](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=medievalbooks.nl)
)

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fernly
The reason that methods of papyri dating have become of interest lately is the
controversy over the so-called "Jesus' Wife" fragment. The question of its
authenticity is right in Hurtado's wheelhouse, so to speak, and he has
addressed it in several posts:

[https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/?s=wife](https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/?s=wife)

~~~
Natsu
I'm still amazed at how such a blatant forgery was not called out more
strongly, given the obvious flaws, not the least of which was its provenance
from the same mystery source as another known fake.

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dangom
I remember reading recently that humans started dating documents relatively
late in history, and that even as late as in the Renaissance most people
wouldn't have been aware of the current calendar year. [Ong 1982] Given that
paleographists estimate how old ancient papyri are by means of dated documents
I wonder:

Where these documents explicitly dated or are datings mostly extracted from
the context (e.g., names of rulers / geographical references)? Are
"documentary" papyri always reliable for comparisons?

In any case very interesting.

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Aelinsaar
_" But, as with all such judgement-activities, experts can disagree, often by
several decades, even a century or so, and sometimes even more."_

That sure escalated in a hurry! Decades... Century... More than a Century.
Still, I get it, when the next best tool (radiocarbon dating) deals in
millennia.

~~~
r0muald
> _" carbon-14 testing can’t really do more than offer a certain probability
> for a timeframe of approximately a century or so: about the same timeframe
> that palaeographers can offer"_

The main takeaway is that the scale of both methods is essentially the same,
and will rarely span more than 100 years, for the time frame of interest to
papyrologists.

~~~
Aelinsaar
I find it oddly comforting that the most sophisticated dating techniques are
no better than what amounts to academic consensus.

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Bromskloss
"Hmm… Yep, it's ancient."

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tsaprailis
Now that's a weird fetish. I obviously don't have anything meaningful to add
to the discussion.

~~~
bayesian_horse
I wanted to say "Are ancient papyri fun to date?"

