tomoi sunkollēsimoi (pasted papyrus documents)

Ingredients

papyrus sheets, glue

Preparation Steps

Original Recipe Text

The production of a tomos sunkollēsimos involved three operations: ordering single documents, pasting them together, and individual numbering (p. 239). The documents were aligned at the bottom, leaving the upper uneven margins intact (p. 234). In specific cases (SB XII 10788 and PSI Congr.XX 10), sheets were pasted top-to-bottom ('vertically') and rotated 90 degrees (p. 234, n. 13). Reused rolls (composite rolls) involved pasting several already-written sheets or scraps together to use the blank back (p. 243). Trimming could be performed to obtain regular margins, sometimes resulting in text loss (p. 243).

Evidence

"The tomoi sunkollēsimoi were convenient to keep documents in a permanent and secure order, and to easily scroll through them as through any roll. As such, depending on the contexts, they can be a useful archiving method or themselves represent an archive. In any case, their production altered the material aspect of the filed documents and was not meant to be reversible."

Remarks

These archival rolls are found in uneven states of conservation, ranging from long strips of several documents to meagre remains of joined sheets (p. 235). Public tomoi sunkollēsimoi could reach hundreds of sheets, whereas private ones were typically shorter (p. 236). The numbering was typically inserted by a single hand in the upper margin, often at a different time than the pasting (p. 240). Some specimens, like P.Brux. I 1–18, show complex reuse where fragments of different tomoi were pasted together to form a new roll for liturgy registers (p. 246).