12.3: The Papyrus
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Here are the translations of the central fragments of the 3rd-century BCE papyrus letter (translation with minor changes from Renberg and Naether 2010): [In Greek]
P.Cairo
10328,
recto
...it also (?) seemed good to me that I should fully inform you about my dream, so that you will know in what ways the gods know you. I have written below in Egyptian so that you will know precisely (
aigyptisti de hypegrapsa, hopôs akribôs eidêis
). When I was about to go to sleep, I wrote two short letters, the one concerning Taunchis the daughter of Thermou- this and the other concerning Tetimouthis the daughter of Taues, who is the daughter of Ptolemaios, and yet one more...
P.Cairo
30961,
recto
...pour a drink for (or anoint) yourself, in which manner I too celebrated a fine (
kalên
) day.
Farewell. Year 2, Phaophi 26.
[
At this point in P.Cairo 30961 recto, Ptolemaios starts to write in Demotic
] I saw myself in a dream in the following way: I am standing at the doorway of the sanctuary. A priest is sitting there, and many people (
~remetch
) are standing beside him. The priest spoke to the people who were standing there: “...”
P.Cairo
30961,
verso
...I spoke [to the] aforementioned [prie]st: “The man of Pamoun – who is it?” He said: “It is Nebwotis”. See, the answer which they gave me: the man of Pamoun whom he named: “He is /That’s life”. He says: “Taunchis”, (and) she said to me: “The man of Pamoun, who is it?” He said, “Nebwotis is it, who has said it”. The one who is there says: “A woman is it outside giving to me...”
This letter has been dated to the 3 rd century BCE, and has been conjectured to be from the Fayum region, although the most recent editors have cast doubt on this provenance (Bagnall and Derow 2004; Goodspeed 1902; Renberg and Naether 2010; Spiegelberg 1908; Wilcken and von Mitteis 1912; Witkowski 1911). If it is indeed of a 3rd-century date, it must be late, due to the use of the reed pen for writing the Egyptian, which suggests a date after 230 BCE (Depauw 1997: 83). The question of interest for this papyrus is why Ptolemaios switches from Greek to Egyptian in order to describe his dream. He writes “I have written below in Egyptian, so that you may accurately understand”. But does this mean that Akhilles’ Greek was not proficient? As Wilcken and von Mitteis suggested a century ago, such a conclusion would be absurd, since if Ptolemaios had thought Akhilles’ knowledge of Greek was inadequate, he would not have written him a Greek letter in the first place (Wilcken and von Mitteis 1912: 74). It seems that the reason for the language shift must be due to something other than language competence. One could identify cultural reasons for the shift (e.g. that when bilinguals discuss religious topics in Ptolemaic Egypt, either in spoken or written form, they might tend toward using Egyptian rather than Greek). Or one might identify linguistic reasons (e.g. that in order to interpret a dream properly one must look to the words themselves — a style of dream interpretation found in both Greek and Egyptian dream-interpretation manuals). I consider such possibilities elsewhere (Kidd 2011). Here, however, rather than pursuing linguistic or religious reasons, I would like to consider the physical influences that were present when Ptolemaios made this language shift, especially regarding the scripts themselves and the material practice of writing these two scripts. Arguably, the material of the writing surface, the pens, and the ink were just as entangled in Ptolemaios’ experience of writing as the immaterial, conceptualized words and sounds, so it is worth considering the materials more closely in their own right. If Greek and Egyptian were generally written with different tools via different embodied practices, could these physical differences inform the language shift? Although language-shifts are generally conceived of as cerebral events, the motions of the hand, the materiality of the pens, and the application of ink on papyrus may also drive the transitions of language, not as passive accompaniments, but active agents. It is to these materials I now turn.