Sur son blog consacré à l’épigraphie, Brice C. Jones nous fait découvrir quelques parchemins antiques (beaucoup plus rares que les papyri !) retrouvés à Oxyrhynque en Egypte.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rubbish dumps of Oxyrhynchus yielded thousands upon thousands of papyrus manuscript fragments that have provided—and continue to provide—a tremendous source of knowledge about the ancient world. But what some people may not realize is the fact that several parchment fragments were also among the finds at Oxyrhynchus. Since parchment was considerably more expensive than papyrus, we can understand why there is almost no extant evidence at Oxyrhynchus of parchment being used for everyday kinds of documents (there are only a few exceptions, such as P.Iand. 2.12 and SB 3.7269). So, the parchment fragments we do find at Oxyrhynchus are primarily literary or sub-literary in genre. And most of these fragments date from the fourth century and later, since parchment, as far as we can tell, did not come to be used with much regularity until the fourth century. In any case, here is a small sample of some interesting parchment fragments discovered at Oxyrhynchus.