The title of this volume comes from a comment made by Arthur Hunt, who, writing of papyrology in 1930, noted that ‘as with archaeological work generally, the pecuniary reward is not likely to be large. Papyrology is no road to early marriage, or even to the possession of a motor car’.¹ In typically self-deprecating fashion, Peter van Minnen kept this quote on the door of his office at the University of Cincinnati for many years. And, in keeping with his sometimes playful approach to scholarship, he left it to the reader of that quote to find the essential context, to complete the idea with Hunt’s point: despite the lack of money or automobiles, papyrology was nevertheless rewarding. ‘The unending variety,’ Hunt wrote, ‘is one of the charms of the subject’. To edit a collection of texts, the papyrologist must become the master of the various, holding threads as disparate as linguistic change or the maximum load borne by a donkey, and weaving them artfully into a scholarly exegesis. Since Peter has so ably demonstrated with his own research and teaching the charms of intellectual variety, it seemed appropriate to collect this assortment of papers under the title Unending Variety. They are offered to him in celebration of his sixty-fifth birthday on 27 February 2024, as a recognition by scholars from around the world of the impact of his research, teaching and disciplinary service.

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Peter laid the foundation for his academic career in a study of Classics at the University of Leiden, which he started in 1977. It soon became clear that he was an extremely bright student, completing both his ‘kandidaatsexamen’ (in 1980) and his ‘doctoraalexamen’ (in 1983) cum laude. His association with the Leiden Papyrological Institute goes back to 1980, when he took up a position as a student assistant under the supervision of Pieter W. Pestman, among other things, contributing to volume 7 of the Berichtigungsliste and the concordance to volumes 1–7, which also bears his name.² As a research associate at the Institute in 1984, he started work on the edition of papyri from the collection, which were eventually published in 1991 in a volume with over a hundred texts edited together with Cisca Hoogendijk, who closely collaborated with him in these years and is also one of the editors of the current volume.³ At the same time, he also taught courses in reading Greek documentary papyri and later in ancient history. From 1985 to 1989, he was a research associate in ancient history at the University of Leiden under supervision of Harry Pleket. It is at this time that he embarked on a dissertation regarding the soci0-economic history of Hermopolis, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), while we also see the beginnings of a dazzling stream of articles with editions, notes, and studies of papyrological texts that characterise his career.

In 1990, a research position at the University of Michigan beckoned: a formative period, as it marked three important moments in his career. First, it was the beginning of a long association with American papyrology, which has continued nearly uninterrupted to the present day. Second, in taking up the position, he was succeeding Traianos Gagos, who was to become a close friend and research collaborator, as appears especially from their co-written book Settling a Dispute.⁴ And third, it brought to the fore his ongoing interest in digital resources for papyrology. His work in Michigan centred on checking texts for inclusion in the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, which remains an essential tool for papyrological research in the twenty-first century.⁵ In 1992, he shifted to Duke University, where he helped to conserve and catalogue the Duke papyrus collection, including an online component.

He then returned to Europe, where he completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Leuven under the supervision of Willy Clarysse in 1997. Even if based in Leuven, he subsequently held a postdoctoral research position, funded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen between 1998 and 2001. By this time, Peter had built up an international name as one of the foremost papyrologists of his generation with articles that have now become classics in the field, such as his ‘The Century of Papyrology’, ‘House-to-House Enquiries’, and ‘Boorish or Bookish?’.⁶ He is also the first editor of the earliest dated Coptic martyrdom, which displays an interest in early Christianity in the papyri that is a common thread throughout his career and no doubt has to do with his Christian upbringing.⁷ Peter is best known, however, for his discovery of the signature of the Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra VII herself on a royal decree, which brought him global attention and media appearances.⁸

In 2002, Peter finally obtained a much wished for and well-deserved academic position in the Department of Classics at the University of Cincinnati, first as an Assistant Professor (2002–2005), then an Associate Professor (2005–2017), and now a Professor of Classics (from 2017). Since arriving at Cincinnati, he has supervised 2 master’s and 7 doctoral students. In 2008–2009, he held a Whitehead Professorship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and from 2010 to 2015, he served as Chair of the Classics Department in Cincinnati, balancing an active research agenda with the challenges of a department in transition.

During his time in Cincinnati, Peter has become one of the main catalysts of papyrological research in the United States, and globally.⁹ Besides being involved as a guest-lecturer in many of the American Society of Papyrologists’ (ASP) Summer Institutes, including the first one at Yale in 2003, he hosted two Summer Institutes in Cincinnati (in 2005 and 2022). Moreover, much of his time in the last almost two decades has been consumed by his role as Editor-in-Chief of the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists (BASP), which he took up in 2006. Since then, he has produced a thick volume each year that reflects not only the vibrancy of the discipline, but also Peter’s careful and encouraging eye as editor. As the ASP Summer Institutes have developed, so too has BASP emerged not just as a leading avenue for papyrological work, but also as an important outlet for the studies produced during those Institutes. For many graduate students, a text edition in BASP is their first publication, and Peter their first contact with the world of academic publishing.

Indeed, Peter’s commitment to outreach and to expanding the field has been a constant throughout his career. In addition to hosting the ASP Summer Institutes twice, he regularly teaches a graduate seminar on papyrology at the University of Cincinnati, and during his time at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in 2008–2009 he ran a similar seminar. In all of these, students are offered, even encouraged, to take on the editing of a papyrus, usually thoughtfully selected for subject-matter and avoiding the most unforgiving examples of ancient handwriting. Many former students and colleagues can recall with fondness the time taken by Peter to discuss papyrology, to help with a difficult reading, or to offer comments on a draft. In his 1930 article, Hunt called for growth in the discipline: ‘Let Papyrology be commended to the consideration of coming candidates …’.¹⁰ It can well be said that Peter has done much to commend papyrology to new generations of scholars – a number of whom are represented among those contributing editions or studies to the present volume or whose names appear in the tabula gratulatoria – and to spread our most cherished inheritance, the amicitia papyrologorum.

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When contemplating how best to honour Peter’s decades of dedicated scholarship, teaching, and service to the discipline, we felt he would be most pleased by a collection of text editions and studies. To reflect the breadth of his own publications and interests, we welcomed editions of any papyrological text, both literary and documentary, on a range of topics, as well as studies based on papyri or more broadly covering Graeco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt. The contributors eagerly took up the call and have contributed texts in demotic, Greek, and Coptic dating across a span of nearly a thousand years of Egypt’s history. Text editions are ‘the core business’ of papyrology, in Peter’s words, and this volume presents fifty-two new or re-edited texts on subjects from Demosthenes to the delivery of camels in early Islamic Egypt, and with provenances stretching from the Eastern to the Western Desert, and from the Egyptian Nile valley to Qasr Ibrim in northern Nubia. In addition, there are five studies, reflecting Peter’s wide-ranging interests. The ‘unending variety’ of papyrology is certainly on display, and we hope readers, too, find the charms of such a collection.

A work of this size is accomplished only with the assistance of many in addition to the editors. We are grateful to the contributors for tirelessly responding to inquiries we had about their texts and to the anonymous referee for providing useful comments on the entire manuscript. We would also like to thank the series editors of Papyrologica Lugduno-Batava for accepting this volume into their series, and the Brill staff, in particular Mirjam Elbers and Giulia Moriconi, as well as our desk editor Gera van Bedaf for her professional help in producing this book.

Peter once declared that good papyrology involves some exclamation. We hope the offering of this volume, and the wealth of studies contained within, occasions many shouts of joy from the honorand.

March 2023

Andrew Connor, Jitse Dijkstra, and Cisca Hoogendijk