Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 7

Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 7 (P. Oxy. 7) is a papyrus found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. It was discovered by Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt in 1897, and published in 1898. It dates to the third century AD.^[1] The papyrus is now in the British Library.^[2]

P. Oxy. 7

Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 7 was the first non-biblical papyrus from the site to be published.^[3] It preserves part of a poem by the archaic Greek poet Sappho.^[a][3] When the papyrus was first published, Grenfell and Hunt wrote that "it is not very likely that we shall find another poem of Sappho". In 1906, however, a major cache of literary fragments from the remains of two private libraries were discovered – the source of the majority of the Sappho fragments discovered at Oxyrhynchus.^[4]

Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 7 measures 19.7 cm × 9.6 cm, and is written in an uncial hand.^[5] Parts of twenty lines of a poem written in Sapphic stanzas survive, with one and a half feet missing from the beginning of each line.^[6]

See also

• Oxyrhynchus Papyri
• Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 6
• Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 8
• Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1231

Notes

1. The poem preserved is Sappho 5 in Voigt's numeration.