The Nijmegen Collection

The Radboud University library in Nijmegen is home to seven papyrus fragments,[1] five of which have remained unpublished until now.[2] Their exact provenance is unknown, and in correspondence from the early 1980s, the curator of the library collection presents two apparently mutually exclusive scenarios concerning their path to the university library. In one letter, he claims that the fragments were saved from a Museum of the Institute of Ancient Literatures, when it was lost in a fire. In this scenario, the fragments would have arrived in the library before the 2nd World War. In the other version, the fragments were donated by Prof. Ros, who held the chair of Ancient Greek from 1945-1968. What we know for certain is that the fragments were sent for restauration to a convent in Oosterhout in 1967.
In 2012, Worp published an article concerning the Von Scherling collection. Erik von Scherling was an antiquities dealer who sold papyri from his basis in Leiden. Among the lists of the papyri sold by this dealer, Worp (2012: 192) identified the two very papyri from the Nijmegen collection that he had edited in 1985 with his colleague Salomons in this journal. This allows us to establish that at least these two papyri were obtained from Von Scherling, who was active from 1932 to 1954.
We can glean more information from this list, however. The two Nijmegen papyri, P.Noviom. inv. 2 and 4, can be found under #7 and #10 on the list headed ‘List 9’, now kept in the archive of the Leiden Museum of Antiquities (Worp and Dekker 2012: 194, fn. 20). On this same list, as #4, we find a papyrus described as ‘Letter from NN to Peteuris...’, the further description confirms that this is in fact P.Noviom. inv. 7, edited below. Moreover, five other papyri in this list (#1, #2, #5, #8, #11) are now kept in the Leiden Museum of Antiquities, and their accession numbers all include the year 1948. It becomes likely that all papyri on this list were sold in that year, and we may assume that Ros, by then already the chair in Nijmegen, was the direct or indirect buyer of the objects that made it into the Nijmegen library.
Finally, before they were conserved between glass panes in 2019, all fragments in the Nijmegen collection had been in a little plastic frame with a small label attached. These labels take the form of a G followed by a number. In the case of P.Noviom. inv. 7, the number on that label (G. 105) occurs in that same form on Von Scherling’s list. G likely stood for ‘Greek’ and the number for the catalogue number in Von Scherling’s collection.[3] By extension, we assume that all seven of the Nijmegen papyri were bought from Von Scherling, possibly in 1948. [4]

[1] Their inventory numbers in the library are Hs 92, numbers 1-7.
[2] P.Noviom. inv. 2 and 4 were published in Salomons and Worp in ZPE 58 (1985) 93-95.
[3] The Coptic papyri also described in Worp and Dekker are labeled with numbers preceded by C.
[4] The two papyri published by Salomons and Worp had labels with the numbers G. 194 (P.Noviom. 2) and G. 209 (P.Noviom. 4).