But Obbink characterized Hughes’ story as a ‘fictionalization’ and an ‘imaginative fantasy.’ ‘Bettany Hughes never saw the papyrus,’ Obbink said. When Obbink later read the text, he said he knew he was looking at poems by Sappho. “German officer” has disappeared now from every other account of the papyrus’ provenance.
#Jan freidland strophes of sappho professional
The anonymous owner - who is a businessman, not a professional collector or academic - had his staff dissolve the tiny stack in warm water. From that pile, they found a folded-up, postcard-size manuscript with lines of text in ancient Greek. One small chunk of cartonnage appeared to contain multiple layers of papyrus, with fragments peeling off from the outside, Obbink said. Obbink said he went to see the packets for himself later that month. The new owner wanted to know if some of the compressed bits of papyri could be identified without peeling the layers apart. “ Obbink said the anonymous buyer called to ask for advice a couple of months after the auction, in January 2012.
The “high-ranking German officer” is gone, and the papyrus was said to have been part of a lot purchased from Christie’s in November 2011. Professor Obbink’s second version of the story was presented in an interview with Megan Gannon for an article in Live Science that ran just under a year later on 23 January 2015. He’d noticed that scraps of the cartonnage (the Egyptian equivalent of papier-mâché, made of recycled papyrus) bore the ghostly imprint of writing.” The owner contacted Professor Obbink, who “prised the layers of shredded papyrus apart” to reveal large fragments of papyrus containing lines of Sappho. According to this article, “ The elderly owner of our new Sappho papyrus wishes to remain anonymous, and its provenance is obscure (it was originally owned, it seems, by a high-ranking German officer), but he was determined its secrets should not die with him.” To recap: According to Professor Obbink’s first version of the story, presented in an interview with Bettany Hughes for an article in The Times published on 2 February 2014, an anonymous owner “had material from an ancient Egyptian burial in his possession. And this is to say nothing of the complications caused by Scott Carroll’s claims regarding the Green Collection Sappho fragments. Each of these two accounts actually have a few variations, but we need not go into that here (if you’re interested, see the recent Eidolon article for a good overview of the state of affairs). Professor Obbink has provided two quite different accounts of how he came to publish the papyrus. The Sappho papyrus published by Professor Dirk Obbink has obscure origins, as many have noted and as I’ve discussed here before.
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