Papyrus fragment.- Dinarchus. In Demosthenem, 2 fragments from a papyrus scroll, probably Egypt, [1st or 2nd century BC].

Papyrus fragment.- Dinarchus. In Demosthenem, 2 fragments from a papyrus scroll, parts of a speech from the Trial of Harpalus, chapters 58-59, remains of 9 lines in a Greek uncial hand, versos blank, soiled with parts of text obscured, set in perspex with printed caption on paper beneath, c.45 x 30mm. and c.20 x 18mm., probably Egypt, [1st or 2nd century BC].

⁂ The earliest known manuscript fragments of one of Dinarchus' three speeches.

The Greek orator Dinarchus was born in Corinth in the middle of the 4th century BC and became a pupil of Demetrius of Phaleron and Theophrastus after moving to Athens. In 324 BC he assisted at the trial of Harpalus, the treasurer of Alexander the Great, who stood accused of embezzling large sums of money from the imperial purse and then bribing Demosthenes and other government officials. Dinarchus wrote the present text - one of only three of his speeches to have survived (In Demosthenem, In Philoclem and In Aristogitonem) - from the trial proceedings. Following Alexander the Great's death, Dinarchus became the first Athenian orator, and died in 292 BC.

Only four other ancient manuscripts of speeches by Dinarchus are recorded, all much later than this example. One is listed by J.W.B. Barns and H. Zilliacus, The Antinoopolis Papyri, Part II, no. 62 (and listed there as "the first example of a manuscript of Dinarchus from Egypt, apart from citations"). Another, once part of a parchment codex and from the third century AD., is recorded by R.A. Pack (The Greek and Latin Literary Texts from Greco-Roman Egypt, 1964: P. Ant. II 81), and two further papyri exist among the Oxyrhynchus materials: P. Oxy. Flight. 49, 3436 and 3437, dated to the second and third centuries AD. respectively. The date of this example suggests it may have been copied within a matter of decades after the author's death.

Provenance:From the collection of Christiane Desroches Noblecourt (1913-2011) the Egyptologist and prolific scholarly author, who joined the Egyptian department of the Louvre. She was the first female fellow of the Institut français d'archéologie orientale, and in 1938 the first woman to lead an archaeological dig. During WW2 she joined the French Resistance helping to hide the Louvre's Egyptian treasures. These fragments were part of her library in the Chateau de Mondemont by 1950.