![]() This corpus, and the array of texts and books it attests, is far from being static: extant collections keep thousands of fragments from Fayum still to be studied and sometimes even catalogued, including a large number of literary texts, and many others have been found during archaeological activities of the last decades, especially by Italian missions. Yet, their historical relevance is as great as its philological value, as they document the arrival and survival of Hellenism in unexpected contexts, a precious complement to information provided by other sources. gnomic anthologies, mimes, rhetorical compositions, aretalogies and religious hymns): a treasure trove of information for many fields of ancient studies, whose potential is largely unexploited. ![]() They offer a offer a variegated sample of ‘classical’ and rare works and authors, from the Homeric poems to ‘lost’ authors as Sappho or Menander, to uncanonical genres (e.g. Until now, more than 1700 literary papyri from Fayum have been published. The proposed research aims at outlining such phenomena through a comprehensive survey of Greek and Latin texts coming from a key zone of Egypt: the district of Fayum (ancient Arsinoites), where Greek immigrants imported their culture since the beginning of Ptolemaic rulership, and where ‘classical’ texts were still read decades after the Arab conquest. As such, papyri play a key role for the reconstruction of crucial historical processes in the Graeco-Roman world: the developing of an early ‘cultural globalization’, its evolution and local declinations, and finally its fading and submerging. Moreover, far from being just a ‘textual repository’, they are the most tangible remains of an intricate phenomenon: the diffusion and reception of Greek literacy and ‘classical’ literary culture from their original centers to the far East, in a chronological span ranging from early Hellenism to the end of Late Antiquity. Greek and Latin literary papyri are a fundamental source of texts and information on ancient literatures and provide almost all of our knowledge about the first steps of book production. In this way, an unprecedented picture of complex acculturation processes will be traced, offering a view from the bottom of the spread and survival of Classical literary heritage. Offering a global survey of Fayum literary papyri, considering textual characteristics, physical features, archaeological context tracing the reception of Greek and Latin literary culture in a specific zone and in a large span of time, so to offer a case study and a model for further philological and historical reflections. Increasing evidence, publishing a selection of new papyri and offering improved editions for those published in the late 19th or early 20th century, through a survey of some major collections in Italy and abroad The research will approach that focusing on papyri from a specific region: the Fayum, where Classical texts were read from early Hellenistic age to decades after the Arab conquest. As such, they play a key role for the reconstruction of crucial historical processes: the developing of an early ‘cultural globalization’, its local declinations, its fading. Greek and Latin literary papyri are the tangible remains of an intricate phenomenon: the diffusion of ‘Classical’ literary heritage from the original centers to the far East.
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