Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 658 (P. Oxy. 658 or P. Oxy. IV 658) is one of four examples of ''
libelli
A ''libellus'' (plural ''libelli'') in the Roman Empire was any brief document written on individual pages (as opposed to scrolls or tablets), particularly official documents issued by governmental authorities.
The term ''libellus'' has particul ...
'' found at
Oxyrhynchus
Oxyrhynchus ( ; , ; ; ), also known by its modern name Al-Bahnasa (), is a city in Middle Egypt located about 160 km south-southwest of Cairo in Minya Governorate. It is also an important archaeological site. Since the late 19th century, t ...
in
Egypt
Egypt ( , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country spanning the Northeast Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to northe ...
. The last lines of the manuscript declare the date — the first year of the emperor
Decius
Gaius Messius Quintus Trajanus Decius ( 201June 251), known as Trajan Decius or simply Decius (), was Roman emperor from 249 to 251.
A distinguished politician during the reign of Philip the Arab, Decius was proclaimed emperor by his troops a ...
, whose full name was Gaius Messius Quintus Traianus Decius.
Text
*Original lines are retained (and numbered).
*Text in
racketsis reconstructed to fill a gap (
lacuna
Lacuna (plural lacunas or lacunae) may refer to:
Related to the meaning "gap"
* Lacuna (manuscripts), a gap in a manuscript, inscription, text, painting, or musical work
**Great Lacuna, a lacuna of eight leaves in the ''Codex Regius'' where there ...
) in the
papyrus
Papyrus ( ) is a material similar to thick paper that was used in ancient times as a writing surface. It was made from the pith of the papyrus plant, ''Cyperus papyrus'', a wetland sedge. ''Papyrus'' (plural: ''papyri'' or ''papyruses'') can a ...
.
*Full stops in brackets represent character spaces that cannot be reconstructed.
*Text in (
parentheses
A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. They come in four main pairs of shapes, as given in the box to the right, which also gives their n ...
) is full spelling of an abbreviation.
*Letters with
subscript
A subscript or superscript is a character (such as a number or letter) that is set slightly below or above the normal line of type, respectively. It is usually smaller than the rest of the text. Subscripts appear at or below the baseline, wh ...
dots are incomplete or indistinct.
See also
*
Lapsi (Christian)
In the Early Christianity, early Christian Church, ''lapsi'' (Latin for "fallen;" ) were apostasy, apostates who renounced their faith under persecution by Roman Empire , Roman authorities. The term refers to those who have lapsed Catholic , laps ...
*
Oxyrhynchus papyri
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of manuscripts discovered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by papyrology, papyrologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt at an ancient Landfill, rubbish dump near Oxyrhync ...
*Other libelli:
POxy 1464,
POxy 2990,
POxy 3929
*
Warrant to arrest a Christian:
POxy 3035
*
Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 657
References
External links
POxy 0658
658
__NOTOC__
Year 658 ( DCLVIII) was a common year starting on Monday of the Julian calendar. The denomination 658 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe ...
POxy 0658
{{Early-Christianity-stub