Oxyrhynchus Papyrus Fragment (Payment Receipt and Calendar Calculations)

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Oxyrhynchus Papyrus Fragment (Payment Receipt and Calendar Calculations)

Place of OriginEgypt, excavated at Al-Bahnasa (ancient Oxyrhynchus)

Date4th century

Dimensionsmaximum: 10 3/16 × 5 in. (25.9 × 12.7 cm)

MediumIndia ink on papyrus

ClassificationManuscripts

Credit LineGift of Edward Drummond Libbey

Object number

1915.33

Not on View

DescriptionThis papyrus fragment preserves two distinct texts on its recto, providing insight into both the financial and administrative training practices of Roman Egypt. The upper text is an account of payments made to a Praepositus (a military or administrative commander), listing a stipend of 36,000 denarii for September 1st and a "present" of 2,500 denarii for July 25th. The lower section of the papyrus contains a text written upside down relative to the account, identified by P.J. Sijpesteijn in 1979 as a series of calculations converting dates according to the Roman calendar system (e.g., calculating the number of days between the "17th day before the Kalends of October" and the "Nones of November").

Label TextHidden on the back of this official receipt is a candid snapshot of a 4th-century professional struggling with office bureaucracy. While the front records a standard payment to a military commander , the back served as a "scratchpad" for a clerk practicing the complex Roman calendar system. Unlike the simple Egyptian calendar, the Roman system required counting backward from fixed dates, leading this scribe to make a conversion error regarding the "Ides of October". This mistake, preserved for nearly two millennia, humanizes the administrative machinery of the Roman Empire, showing that even ancient professionals found the imperial dating system confusing.

This scrap of papyrus survived only because it was discarded in the ancient rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus ("City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish"), about 120 miles south of Cairo. Excavated by the Egypt Exploration Fund in the early 20th century, it was hand-selected for the Toledo Museum of Art in 1915.

Published References

Hunt, Arthur S., The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, London, 1910, vol. VII, pp. 199 - 200, no. 1047.

Sijpesteijn, P.J., "Some Remarks on Roman Dates in Greek Papyri," Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Band 33, 1979, p. 237 ff.