Sozomena means saved in Greek. The series is dedicated to the recovery and presentation of texts that have only survived from Greek or Roman antiquity thanks to extraordinary find circumstances. It is primarily concerned with papyri, thousands of which await deciphering in universities and libraries.
The primary intention of the series is to edit and interpret texts, but methods of recovery and presentation will also be discussed, so that different types of books will be published: editions of texts, commentaries, monographs and collections. The main language is English, together with German and Italian.
This book provides the first full edition and commentary of the Oxyrhynchus Glossary (POxy 1802 and 4812). This is a unique document both for the history of Greek lexicography and for the study of the cultural and linguistic exchange between the Greeks and the "others" in the Hellenistic near East. The fragment contains a fully alphabetized glossary with lemmas defined as "Persian," "Babylonian," and "Chaldaean", as well as lemmas taken from Greek dialects or common Greek. The entries are rich in quotations from ancient authorities including Berossus, Apollodorus and Erasistratus. This glossary had never been analyzed in depth previously. Francesca Schironi provides a comprehensive introduction and commentary that places the Oxyrhynchus Glossary into the wider context of Greek lexicography and scholarship, discusses its interest for non-Greek languages and the problems related to linguistic exchanges in the Near Eastern areas, and shows the uniqueness and value of this document. The Oxyrhynchus glossary and this study will be of interest to classicists, papyrologists, comparative philologists, and scholars interested in the history of Greek lexicography and scholarship.
Francesca Schironi, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
