Saturday, January 28, 2006

Ancient papyrus goes on display

"It served first as a notebook for ancient painters and then as part of a mummy's wrapping. Now, a first century B.C. parchment believed to contain the earliest cartography of the Greek-Roman era will be on display next month in the northern city of Turin. The Papyrus of Artemidorus tells a tale of more than 2,000 years of art and culture. . . .The parchment's story begins around the mid-first century B.C., when a copyist in Alexandria, Egypt, began working on a blank parchment to copy the second of 11 books by Greek geographer Artemidorus of Ephesus . . . . The parchment surfaced again in the Nile Valley, where it was used as a wrapping for a mummy, lying in the ground for 1,800 years"
The parchment, which was purchased for $3,369,850 will be on display at the Bricherasio Palace (Turin, Italy) from February 8th for three months. It may be loaned out to other collections in the future. For the full story see the above page.

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