Letter to an Oracle, in Greek, manuscript on papyrus [Egypt, first century BC.]

papyrus sheet (with small losses at upper right and lowermost edges), 103mm. by 67mm., remains of 13 lines in Ptolemaic cursive in black ink, reverse blank, small cracks and rubbed areas with losses but quite legible (and with authors’ proof copy of last academic publication on this item enclosed), framed in perspex

From the collection of Anton Fackelmann (1916-86), conservator of the Vienna Papyrus Sammlung, and presumably recovered from mummy cartonnage. Published by H. Bannert and H. Harrauer in Wiener Studien, N.F. 14, 1980, pp.37-9 (erroneously identified as a court speech), and again by M. Gronewald and D. Hagedorn, ‘Eine Orakelbitte aus Ptolemäischer Zeit’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 41, 1989, pp.289-93.

This papyrus was identified in 1989 as one of the earliest extant examples of an extremely rare text from antiquity – a direct address by a supplicant to an Oracle. Other surviving examples show that when supplicants sought the help of Oracles in Egypt (and presumably Greece) they frequently handed over their questions to the priests in a written form, and received the same written document in reply. Many such texts include only brief questions, such as "should I go?", affording us precious few details of the life of the individuals concerned, but here there is a relative wealth of information and the question asked remains heart-wrenching some twenty-one centuries later. The writer names himself as Ptolemaios, notes that he is the god’s "servant", and states "due to a lack of the bare necessities of life, I have left my homeland, taking my children with me, and I now ask you to show yourselves to be merciful towards me and my children, and to return to me this sheet [with a reply] if it is useful to me to continue to live with them …".

This is one of the very earliest of these records to survive, and in fact only one other dates as early as the Ptolomaic period: P. Mil. Vogl. III 127.