I’d like to reply to some of Professor Walsh’s statements addressing the argument I made in my previous posting.
“Power of a powerful scholar’s name alone to legitimate an antiquity” – this is not true under any definition of a scholar’s power. The present situation is not about influence: Dr. Obbink is simply a very good papyrologist with laser-like intuitions about Greek writing, scribal hands, etc.; the people contributing to this and other fora take Dr Obbink’s word a) that the papyrus exists (the “Thomas Wise” argument I made above) and b) that the sequence of letters offered in the left column of the preprint is the best one could make of the papyrus. The rest — even though Dr Obbink makes the attribution in no uncertain terms – is our decision.
“should we regard the previously-unknown word forms as the real deal?” – I don’t understand the argument. In fact, previously unknown forms can be the clinching argument when deciding about forgery. Professor Walsh says that “the audience is probably prepared to accept some things that don’t fit what we know” – no, this has nothing to do with the argument at hand. The decision of whether or not this is authentic Lesbian poetry is not about accepting things that don’t fit – it’s about finding things that *perfectly* fit the linguists’ theory of the dialect despite being absent from handbooks from which the alleged forger would take them (the assumption Professor Walsh does not make, to be sure). In other words, the dialect of the poem is more than just the Lesbian that we know: the poem features forms that are absent from the lexica or the handbooks, but still conform perfectly to our expectations.
In this light I might just as well correct my statement in the previous post: in order to produce this piece, the purportedly highly paid dedicated team of professionals would need to have a Greek dialectologist gone rogue on their payroll. Again, this has nothing to do with the provenance of the scroll or being a “defender” of Dr Obbink.
As an illustration of my point about language facts serving as proof of authenticity, it may be useful to recall the story of Old Russian epic “Slovo o Polku Igoreve”: since the sole manuscript of the poem was said to have perished in 1812, it was widely assumed that the poem is a forgery. It took almost two centuries of close study of comparative Slavic syntax to show (in 2004) that this poem uses the enclitics (things like particles or unaccented pronouns) in an astonishingly correct way, just as they had to be used in the 13th cent.: these rules could simply not have been known to a hypothetical forger.
I’d like to make one more point clear: as most people here, I hope, I am against looting of antiquities. Moreover, as a historical linguist, I am aware of this issue not just in relation to Graeco-Roman antiquities, but also in regard to Hittite tablets excavated in Turkey, manuscripts of the Vedas discovered in Cashmir, Zoroastrian manuscripts in Bombay, and Novgodod birch-bark letters. In general, classical philologists are painfully aware of the issues involved; we’re not the backwards group the media are trying to paint us as. But I take the possibility indicated by Dr. Prodi (as well as other options) quite seriously: there is no evidence that this papyrus recently left Egypt and it may well be the case that it came to Europe more than a hundred years ago and recently changed ownership.
Moreover, I am still not sure what it is exactly Profs. Walsh and Tronchin would like all of us here to do: publicly chastise Dr Obbink? refrain from any discussion of what for reasons independent of the provenance of the papyrus seems to be a piece of authentic Lesbian poetry? The way things are, the discussion on this forum does not add extra value to the artefact.
Yes, it’s been a week – but only two days since Professor Walsh hi-jacked this little philological forum. They sure did feel like a week.