Th e Papyrus Collection of the University of Michigan is one of the most important collections of its kind in the world. An online database contains descriptive records for the more than 12,000 items in the collection (www.lib.umich.edu/pap), and scholars everywhere are able to study many of these ancient documents via the internet.
Many of these items, although listed, still need conservation work and cannot yet be studied. The papyri may have to be unfolded or unrolled carefully in order to reveal writing. Writing may be obscured by traces of salt, dirt, and sometimes even dung, requiring careful and intensive cleaning. Often, papyri have come to the collection in many fragments that have to be treated individually before the conservator and the papyrologist can work together in an attempt to reconstruct the document.
Th is work requires highly-trained experts. It is time-consuming, sometimes taking as many as 100 hours to conserve one fragment, and the cost is often outside our budget. But the collection is too important not to continue on. So, we are asking for your help. For a gift of $250, you will be acknowledged in the permanent online catalog as having funded the conservation of a speci fic papyrus. For a gift of $500, you will be acknowledged in the catalog for sponsoring two documents and will be invited to watch a conservator work on “your” fragment.
Please help us unveil the secrets of the past by making this valuable collection available to scholars everywhere. Thank you!!
Arthur Verhoogt, Archivist of the Papyrology Collection
University of Michigan Library
807 Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library
Ann Arbor MI 48109-1190
734-764-9369
verhoogt@umich.edu
