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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2019
In 1977, French excavations at Aï Khanoum in north-east Afghanistan—a foundation of Antiochus I Sotēr and subsequently one of the major cities of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom—of a building dating to shortly before the destruction of the place in 145 b.c.e. uncovered inter alia the remains of a papyrus and a parchment document. The papyrus text, dated by Cavallo on the basis of its letterforms to the mid third century b.c.e., preserved a fragment of a philosophical dialogue seemingly to be associated with the Peripatetic school. The second document consisted of two separate portions of a piece of parchment roughly assigned on the basis of its letterforms to the second half of the third or the first half of the second century b.c.e.; as also in the case of the papyrus, the letters survived not on the parchment itself but impressed upon the hardened dirt that surrounded it. Only column II of the original editors’ ‘Texte 2a’ (the more substantial of the two parchment fragments) contains a significant amount of text, which appears in neither TrGF nor PCG. I present it here without regard to standard editorial niceties, which are rendered impossible by the desperate state of the original document, now almost certainly lost, and the nature of the original publication.
1 Rapin, C., Cavallo, P. Hadot, G., ‘Les textes grecs de la Trésorerie d'Aï Khanoum’, BCH 111 (1987), 225–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with discussion of the fragment treated here at 249–59. Rougemont, G., Inscriptions grecques d'Iran et d'Asie centrale (London, 2012), 241–2Google Scholar also presents the text (his #132), but is directly dependent on Rapin et al. and draws no further conclusions about author, genre or the like. The philosophical text is Rougemont's #131 ([this note], 236–40); see the careful discussion of Hoffmann, P., ‘La philosophie grecque sur les bords de l'Oxus : un réexamen du papyrus d'Aï Khanoum’, in Jouanna, J., Schiltz, V. and Zink, M. (edd.), La Grèce dans les profondeurs de l'Asie (Paris, 2016), 165–232Google Scholar, who offers inter alia a complete account of the archaeological context of both finds and speculates that the papyrus may have been brought to Aï Khanoum by Clearchus of Soli, who is known to have visited the place. See further Hoffmann's discussion in CRAI 2017, III, 1103–51. I am grateful to Prof. Hoffmann, Benjamin W. Millis and an anonymous referee for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this note.
2 I retain the numbering of the original publication, which includes a line containing only a few letter-traces at the very top. The bits of earth that preserved the writing on the papyrus and parchment texts were deposited in the Kabul Museum and are now considered lost; what survives are the photographs printed in the original publication (n. 1 above, figs. 15–23; originals in the archives of the Délégation archéologique française en Afghanistan (DAFA) preserved in the École normale supérieure in Paris. The site of Aï Khanoum itself has been devastated by clandestine excavation, and there seems to be little hope of recovering anything else of scientific value from it.
3 E.g. Aj. 733, OT 39, 42, Ant. 253, El. 17, 272, 1318, OC 1201. Homer uses ἡμίν a number of times (e.g. Il. 17.415, Od. 8.569), probably as a metrically driven innovation; subsequently on the Homeric model at e.g. Semon. fr. 3.1 West, Thgn. 235, Theoc. 25.179, Ap. Rhod. Argon. 1.897. The form is secure only once in comedy, at Phryn. Com. fr. 38 ἐβουλόμην ἂν ἧμιν ὥϲπερ καὶ προτοῦ, although it might also be printed at Eupolis, fr. 385.4, where editors routinely follow Elmsley in emending it away. See also [Hdn.] Grammatici Graeci 3.2 p. 517.19–22; S. Kaczko, ‘ἡμῖν, ἥμιν, ἧμιν da Omero a Sofocle : problemi linguistici e editoriali’, RFIC 130 (2002), 257–98. The failure of Euripides in particular to use ἡμίν seems to have been first noted in modern times by August Matthiae on Hec. 512 (his line 507) in volume 6 of his ten-volume edition of the tragedies (Leipzig, 1821).
4 The situation is similar with ὑμίν, which Aeschylus uses only once (at Supp. 259), Euripides never, but Sophocles constantly (e.g. Aj. 864, 1242, 1264, 1282, El. 804, 1328, OT 991, 1402, 1482).
5 Intriguingly, all that can be read in Col. I is γαμου in 18, which might—or might not—suggest that marriage is indeed somehow the main topic of conversation here.
6 Indeed, Aï Khanoum had a theatre with a capacity of around 6,000 people, leaving little doubt that, even if the parchment play of Sophocles was not performed there, other Greek dramas were. Cf. the elegant conclusion of Hoffmann (n. 1), 228 in regard to the philosophical text: ‘Mais l'essentiel demeure: le papyrus d'Aï Khanoum, témoignage de débats philosophiques récents dans les milieux platoniciens et aristotéliciens, est une illustration des intérêts intellectuels des élites grecques de Bactriane, et illustre de façon éclatante la vitalité de l'hellénisme, au IIIe siècle, au coeur de l'Asie centrale.’ That the Sophocles was written on parchment suggests that it is a local copy, as opposed to the papyrus, which must have been brought to Aï Khanoum from somewhere in the Mediterranean world.