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Two Greek School-Tablets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

Extract

Mr. Milne's article in the last volume of the Journal (xxviii. 121 ff.) calls attention to an interesting class of documents, the tablets or ostraka which served as school-books in Graeco-Roman Egypt. The British Museum has recently acquired two unusually good and complete specimens of this class. As they are, to the best of my belief, the most perfect that have yet come to light, it seems worth while to publish them in extenso.

The first (now Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 37516) is a single wooden tablet, 1 ft. 4½ in. in length, 5¼ in. high at the left-hand end, and 4¾ in. at the right-hand end. Projecting from the left-hand end is a small knob, nearly an inch in diameter, through which a hole is bored, by which means the tablet could be suspended from a nail in the wall of the school, as in the well-known kylix of Douris at Berlin. The corners at both ends are rounded.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1909

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References

1 Mon. d. I. ix. Pl. LIV.; Freeman, Schools of Hellas, Pl. I.

1a Words thus marked are in the original written above the line.

2 Corrected from something longer, perhaps αποβαντοις.

3 Sc. παρακєίμєνα = perfecta.

3a This figure may apply to the passive (and middle) participles, which are eighteen in number as here given; but there is no obvious reason for its addition.

4 The apparent γ is presumably a slip of the pen, and Epaphroditus the name of the school-boy to whom the book belonged.

5 Sc. μισῶ.

6 Sc. παλαιστῶ.

7 Sc. πєριπολῶ.

8 Sc. κατακόπτω.

9 This line is erased.

10 Sc. παρєγγυῶ.

11 Sic, for προθυμοῦμαι.

12 Corrected from єπικω.

13 Sc. προφασίζομαι.

14 Sc. καταδυσωπῶ, a late and rare word.

15 Apparently written єυєυγєλιζω, with the first two letters erased. Not, of course, in the Christian sense, cf. 1. 269.

16 The spaces between question and answer are not in the original, as a rule, but are left here to assist the reader.

17 Altered to τις.

18 Sc. σικχαῖνον.

19 Corrected from ποιουσωτια.

20 Presumably for αδρος.

21 Sic, for και Αια.

22 το partly washed out. Apparently the colophon was at first written in one line.