A Guide to the University of Toronto’s Classics Department Papyrus Collection at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Classics Department Papyrus Collection at the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library was formed by Alan E. Samuel when he arrived at the University of Toronto in 1966. The collection consists of three inventory types: the Paper Towel (PT) Inventory, which was purchased in 1965 by Samuel when he was in Egypt; the Oxford University Gazette (OUG) Inventory, which consists of small fragments excavated from El Hibeh by Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt in 1902 and 1903; and the Rostovzteff-Welles (RW) Inventory, which consists of larger papyrus fragments from the same source as the OUG Inventory. The entire collection is described in an appended catalogue that provides information on the condition and contents of each inventory designation and lists the storage method, material type, language(s), proposed date(s), document type(s), number of fragments and dimensions. The collection consists mainly of Greek documents and letters extracted from Ptolemaic mummy cartonnage dating to the third century BCE, but there are also a few Demotic pieces, as well as late Greek papyri, three Coptic pieces and one Arabic letter. In order to make the papyri readily available for scholarship and decrease their handling, they were photographed in visible light and near infrared. The near infrared photographs improve the legibility of the ink by increasing its visibility through thin layers of gesso and certain stains. Additionally, the contrast of the ink against the papyrus background is high at near infrared wavelengths, which improves the legibility of extremely darkened papyri and effaced, faded and washed out ink. Three Ptolemaic documents that were poorly legible in visible light, but significantly improved in near infrared photographs, are also transcribed and translated in this paper: a receipt for various tax payments, a list of names and payments, and a list of names for tax collection in arrears.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".