Remarks on Some Tebtunis Papyri in SB XVIII

Twelve Tebtunis papyri from the University of California collection were included in Elbert Wall's 1983 Duke dissertation, New Texts in the Economy of Tebtynis. Previously accessible as P. Tebt. Wall on CD Rom 6 of the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, the texts were recently printed in hard copy in SB XVIII under numbers 1382-1393. I first saw the SB texts during a visit to Leuven in March 1995 and realized that they included some papyri that I had worked on during my years in Berkeley, 1968-1974. They were to be part of a lukewarmly projected fifth volume of Tebtunis Papyri; but the late John Shelton's move to Germany and my own move to Chicago and near simultaneous rededication to Byzantine studies allowed the project to lapse. Thus there is no sense in which either John Shelton or I would have argued for an extended claim to these and other Berkeley papyri. In fact, their publication is most welcome. Nevertheless, when back in Chicago I reviewed the SB transcripts against the ones I had made years ago, I noted a fair number of differences, some significant. Those for all but one of the six papyri discussed here (SB XVIII 13784 = P.Tebt. II 502 = P.Tebt.Wall3), I could quickly check against photographs I had brought with me from Berkeley to Chicago in 1974; subsequently, a photograph of P.Tebt. II 502 was obtained through the good graces of Anthony S. Bliss, Rare Book Librarian of the Bancroft Library. Wall's dissertation includes plates of all twelve papyri, but copies of the dissertation obtainable through interlibrary loan have of course only Xeroxes of these. In some places these can be helpful, in others not. I therefore publish here, for the readers' convenience and in anticipation of possible further improvements to the texts, plates of five of the six papyri under discussion; the sixth, P. Tebt. II 527, is far too large to be easily and economically reproduced in BASP's format.