New Link and a New Christian Documentary Papyrus

I have added a new link to a very important online resource for the study of Coptic manuscripts — the Koptische Namensliste, short for Namen in Koptischen dokumentarischen Texten ("Names in Coptic Documentary Texts"). We are all indebted to Monika Hasitzka for making this PDF freely available online. 

On a related note, I take the opportunity to mention here that, several weeks ago, I offered an online edition of a Coptic Christian documentary papyrus that appeared on eBay in which the name "Didymos" (Didyme pap.) occurs. This papyrus has since disappeared and I have no knowledge of its current whereabouts. I originally posted the edition of this papyrus on my former blog (The Quaternion) but I repost it here on the hopes that news about this important papyrus will reach a wider audience. 

(Originally posted 17 December, 2012) A few weeks ago, I posted about an early Sahidic Coptic codex leaf of Galatians 2 that I identified in an eBay auction. Yesterday (December 17th, 2012), our eBay seller posted another papyrus auction, this time of a beautiful Coptic documentary text. Unfortunately, just about as soon as he posted it, he removed it from eBay. However, I saved the image to my computer and have managed to make a transcription and translation. It is a letter informing the addressee about payments of some sort and about a certain Didymos who came to a village and was given a date palm-tree. There is also mention of an old woman who tells (presumably) Didymos that it is her birthday. Here is the image posted by the seller on eBay, followed by my transcription and translation:

Unfortunately, the names of the sender and recipient are not mentioned. The thHllO ("old woman") in line 9 may be the equivalent to the ama ("mother"), head of a nunnery. The corresponding words in Coptic for "old man/elder" and "father," which are very commonly used in Coptic literature, are pHllo and apa, respectively. It is not altogether clear if Didymos is the same person to whom the writer gave money, came to the village, and received the date palm-tree, but that interpretation seems likely. In line 10, there is space between paH and oymice, but it works best, I think, to take these letters together: paHoymice ("birthday"). There is also space on line 10 between mice and pe; we could restore with mu here, which would create the reading mpeFi ("you took"). However, I think the verb Fi works best in the imperative and so I have taken the pe on the previous line as a personal subject pronoun. It appears that the fiber orientation is horizontal, which means that we are looking at the recto. The dialect is Sahidic and the script is a well-formed, bilinear example of the biblical majuscule or unimodular script. There were no other images and so we will probably never know anything else about this papyrus. It is not clear why the seller pulled the auction so early. Perhaps someone gave him the $14,000 that he was asking for! In any case, we now have record of a previously unknown Coptic document.