User:Caeciliusinhorto/brothers poem provenance

Relevant sources:
 * Daily Beast (archive) - accusations against Obbink call into questions provenance of PSO
 * Brent Nongbri - Obbink's carbon dating claims for P.S.O don't make sense
 * David Gill ("Looting Matters" blog) - another early voice asking for details of provenance
 * Adrian Murdoch (archive link) - "elephant in the room is the distinct lack of provenance"
 * Paul Barford compares Obbink's lack of concern about the provenance of PSO to uncritically taking a laptop "from some bloke he met in the pub"
 * EES press release
 * Theodore Nash, CHS - P.S.O probably an illicitly acquired, looted antiquity
 * C. Michael Sampson - GC fragments returned to Egypt; evidence suggests that Obbink fabricated claimed provenance of PSO
 * 2011 Christie's Sale - lot contained fragments from the Robinson collection as well as collection of P. Deaton (?unclear if that accounts for all the fragments!)
 * Hyland's ZPE article (2021): suggests that the Sappho fragments were either illicitly smuggled out of Egypt in the turmoil of the Arab Spring, or came from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri

Preservation
Sappho is thought to have written around 10,000 lines of poetry, of which only around 650 survive. Only one poem, the Ode to Aphrodite, is known to be complete; many preserve only a single word. In 2014, Dirk Obbink, Simon Burris, and Jeffrey Fish published five fragments of papyrus, containing nine separate poems by Sappho. Three were previously unknown, and the find amounted to the largest expansion of the surviving corpus of Sappho's work for 92 years. The most impressive is "Brothers Poem" fragment, called P. Sapph. Obbink, part of a critical edition of Book I of Sappho's poetry. The remaining four fragments, P. GC. inv. 105 frr. 1–4, are written in the same hand, and have the same line-spacing.

P. Sapph. Obbink measures 176 mm × 111 mm. Carbon-dating places it as between the first and third centuries AD, which is consistent with the third century AD handwriting. The roll of which P. Sapph. Obbink was part would have been produced in Alexandria, and likely taken to Fayum. There is evidence that the roll was damaged and repaired; it was later reused as cartonnage – a material similar to papier-mâché made with linen and papyrus – which Obbink suggests was used as a book cover. P. Sapph. Obbink preserves 20 lines of the Brothers Poem, followed by 9 lines of another work by Sappho, the Kypris Poem. It is, according to author and scholar James Romm, the best-preserved extant Sappho papyrus. A second papyrus, Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 2289, published by Edgar Lobel in 1951, preserves enough of the Brothers Poem to show that at least one stanza preceded the well-preserved portion.

Provenance
Soon after the discovery of P. Sapph. Obbink was made public in January 2014, scholars began to raise questions about the provenance. The initial version of Obbink's article announcing the discovery said that the papyrus was in a private collection, but contained no discussion of its origin or ownership history, as would be usual when reporting on a newly-discovered ancient artefact; C. Michael Sampson describes this absence as "anomalous and suspicious". Archaeologists immediately criticised this lack of transparency, and the initial version of Obbink's article was soon taken down. Since then, several contradictory claims have been made about the history of P. Sapph. Obbink.

The earliest discussions of the provenance began shortly after the announcement of the discovery in January 2014. In an article in the Sunday Times, Bettany Hughes reported that the papyrus was originally owned by a German officer, while Obbink wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that it was found in mummy cartonnage. Obbink later claimed that the German officer mentioned by Hughes was an "imaginative fantasy", and that the original belief that the papyrus had come from mummy cartonnage was due to a misidentification. Based on information contained in a brochure for a sale of the papyrus compiled by Christie's in 2015, Sampson identifies the German officer mentioned by Hughes as and argues that this initial story was fabricated to cover for defects in the papyrus' true provenance.

In 2015, Dirk Obbink presented a second account of the provenance in a paper delivered to the Society for Classical Studies. He claimed that the papyrus derived from the collection of David Moore Robinson, who had purchased it in 1954 from an Egyptian dealer, Sultan Maguid Sameda, and on his death left it to the University of Mississippi Library. Part of the Robinson collection was offered for sale through Christie's in 2011; Obbink reported that P. Sapph. Obbink was included in this sale, and was bought by a collector in London. It was this anonymous owner who gave Obbink, the head of Oxford University's Oxyrhynchus Papyri project, access to the papyrus and permission to publish it. However, Dorothy King observed that Christie's description of the papyri in their 2011 sale did not match up with what is known of P. Sapph. Obbink, and argued that it was not in fact part of the 2011 sale. Sampson notes that the presence of the papyrus in the 2011 sale is unverifiable, and in an article with Anna Uhlig for Eidolon, observes that no documentation supporting this account has been produced, and that the evidence for it is "principally Obbink's word". Following the publication of Sampson's 2020 article, in which he concluded that "I doubt [Obbink's 2015 account of the provenance] is true even in part", Anton Bierl and André Lardinois published a retraction to Obbink's chapter in The Newest Sappho which repeated this account, citing the "tainted" provenance, and Obbink's failure to provide a "substantive response" to Sampson's allegations.

A third possible provenance was reported in 2020, when Brent Nongbri published an email from Mike Holmes, the Director of the Museum of the Bible Scholars Initiative, which revealed evidence that P.GC. inv. 105 had been sourced from Turkish antiquities dealer Yakup Eksioglu. The Atlantic reported that Eksioglu had corroborated this, and had also claimed that P.Sapph.Obbink came from his collection. In an article for the Center for Hellenic Studies, Theodore Nash concluded that the papyrus was "almost guaranteed" to be connected to Eksiolgu. According to Eksioglu, P. Sapph. Obbink and P. GC inv. 105 had been in his family collection for over a century, though he provided no documentation for this. Brian D. Hyland rejects this as "simply not believable".

Critics of the lack of transparency around the provenance of the papyrus have suggested that this is to hide a questionable origin. Sampson suggests that the accounts given in 2014 and 2015 were fabricated to conceal an undocumented – or "unmentionable" – true origin. Theodore Nash argues that "the convoluted cartonnage narrative was simply a red herring to legitimise a recently looted papyrus". Hyland suggests that the papyri might instead have been smuggled out of Egypt around 2011, during the overthrow of president Mubarak; or that they may have been among the uncatalogued papyri excavated by Grenfell and Hunt at Oxyrhynchus.

The current ownership and location of P. Sapph. Obbink is unknown.