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Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Columbia University Ostrakon Collection, 150 BCE -800 CE

3600 items
Ostraca are pottery fragments and flakes of limestone with writing in ink. "Ostraka" is the plural; "ostrakon" is a single item; the word can also be spelled with a "c" as in ostraca and ostracon. Some contain Greek, but the majority is Coptic, and they range in date from the sixth to the seventh century CE. They include about one hundred school exercises (especially abecedaries), private letters, religious texts, receipts, etc. With few exceptions, the ostraka come from monasteries in Upper Egypt around Luxor. Columbia Libraries Ostraka range in date from 150 BCE to the ninth century CE; the majority is dated 6th – 7th century CE. Some of the ostraka come from early gifts and from Egypt Exploration Society distribution of Oxyrhynchos ostraka, but most of the ostraca were acquired at the behest of Professor A. Arthur Schiller in two lots from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1958 and 1961. They come largely from the unpublished material deriving from the Museum's excavations at Deir el Bahri and at the Monastery of Epiphanius, though some were purchases by and gifts to the MMA. Many of these Coptic ostraka are very fragmentary and little can be said about their contents. In 1991, 10 ostraca found near the ancient Mons Porphyites, in the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea, in Egypt, were donated by Roger Bagnall and added to the collection.
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Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library papyrus collection, 300 BC-500 AD

2150 pieces of papyrus

The Columbia collection includes ca. 2150 papyri and over 3600 ostraca in a variety of languages including Greek, Latin, Egyptian (Demotic, Coptic and Hieratic) and Arabic. Among the papyri, there are also a few texts on parchment and paper. The papyri range in date from the 3rd century BCE to the 7th century CE and come from different parts of Egypt. About 300 have been published in the volumes of Columbia Papyri (P.Col., volumes I-XI) and a few more were published elsewhere. The papyri preserve a variety of texts, from ancient fragments of important literary works (Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Euripides' Orestes, Plato's Phaedrus) written much earlier than the medieval manuscripts upon which modern editions are usually based, to mundane documents such as private letters, tax receipts, petitions and contracts, which illustrate the economic activities, personal relationships, legal conflicts and contractual arrangements of people in Greco-Roman Egypt over a period of about 1000 years.

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Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Gilbert Highet papers, 1929-1978

21.27 linear feet

Correspondence, manuscripts, typescripts, notes, photographs, and printed materials relating to his research, writing, and teaching. The correspondence relates chiefly to research for his books, articles, essays, and lectures as well as reactions, scholarly and popular, to his works. There are single letters for authors including Maxwell Anderson, Lawrence Durrell, Randall Jarrell, and Upton Sinclair; several letters each from John Masefield, James Thurber, and E.B. White; 21 letters from Clifton Fadiman; correspondence with Columbia University faculty and students; with classical scholars in the United States, Great Britain, and Europe; with publishers including Alfred A. Knopf and Oxford University Press; with his literary agent Curtis Brown, Ltd.; with HORIZON MAGAZINE, as chairman of its Advisory Editorial Board; with the Book-of-the-Month Club, as a Judge; with Encyclopedia Britannica Sound Seminars; correspondence concerning his very popular syndicated radio talks; and letters from his readers, ranging from members of women's literary clubs to headmasters of British secondary schools.

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