Books 2009: an accidental immortality
Nov. 7th, 2009 12:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbBooks 2009: 92
non-fiction
92. Peter Parsons, City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Papyri Beneath the Egyptian Sands Reveal a Long-Lost World, London, 2007.
"Oxyrhynchos exists again today as a waste-paper city, a virtual landscape which we can repopulate with living and speaking people. The theatre has vanished, but we still have some of the prompt-copies that its actors used. The baths have vanished, but we can reconstruct their dynasty of cloakroom attendants. The market has vanished, but we know its porridge-stall and its imported cow-pats and the harrassed officials who collected the tax on brothels. Long-dead citizens, of whom we have no portrait and no tombstone, communicate from their documents. For some, we have enough for a soap-opera: Tryphon the weaver and his wives, Lollianos the schoolmaster and his war with the town council, the public duties and private poetry of Sarapion-Apollonianos and his clan. For others, there is a single glimpse: Senthonis with her pillow-case full of dates, Serenos whose wife sent him 'letters that could shake a stone', the reluctant Mayor who has an illness and coughs from his lungs."
This is excellent history. Vivid, detailed, thorough, fluent, readable; written with empathy and enthusiasm and the occasional glimmer of humour. Parsons is a papyrologist and scholar of the first water, writing with an eye for both specialist and the non-specialist audience. He does so very well indeed: I confess myself delighted with this book, and very happy indeed to have read it.
If you are looking for an introduction to daily life in Graeco-Roman Egypt, or even an interesting history book to while away the hours, this is it. Most definitely, this is it.
Last night, I scrabbled my way up my first 6B+, albeit witha little cheating, much swearing, and a godawful lot of dogging on the rope. I also improved a 6C route, which made me happy. Other routes did not make me quite so happy, but c'est la vie, c'est la guerre, as they say.
non-fiction
92. Peter Parsons, City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Papyri Beneath the Egyptian Sands Reveal a Long-Lost World, London, 2007.
"Oxyrhynchos exists again today as a waste-paper city, a virtual landscape which we can repopulate with living and speaking people. The theatre has vanished, but we still have some of the prompt-copies that its actors used. The baths have vanished, but we can reconstruct their dynasty of cloakroom attendants. The market has vanished, but we know its porridge-stall and its imported cow-pats and the harrassed officials who collected the tax on brothels. Long-dead citizens, of whom we have no portrait and no tombstone, communicate from their documents. For some, we have enough for a soap-opera: Tryphon the weaver and his wives, Lollianos the schoolmaster and his war with the town council, the public duties and private poetry of Sarapion-Apollonianos and his clan. For others, there is a single glimpse: Senthonis with her pillow-case full of dates, Serenos whose wife sent him 'letters that could shake a stone', the reluctant Mayor who has an illness and coughs from his lungs."
This is excellent history. Vivid, detailed, thorough, fluent, readable; written with empathy and enthusiasm and the occasional glimmer of humour. Parsons is a papyrologist and scholar of the first water, writing with an eye for both specialist and the non-specialist audience. He does so very well indeed: I confess myself delighted with this book, and very happy indeed to have read it.
If you are looking for an introduction to daily life in Graeco-Roman Egypt, or even an interesting history book to while away the hours, this is it. Most definitely, this is it.
Last night, I scrabbled my way up my first 6B+, albeit witha little cheating, much swearing, and a godawful lot of dogging on the rope. I also improved a 6C route, which made me happy. Other routes did not make me quite so happy, but c'est la vie, c'est la guerre, as they say.
