The "Artemidorus Papyrus" (P. Artemid.), first published in 2008, is potentially the most significant new discovery in recent years for a range of fields within Classics: the history of drawing in the Greco-Roman world and more generally issues in the history of art, the history of ancient mapping, and the history of geographical writing in Hellenistic Egypt. Its spectacular and unprecedented collection of images and texts has been the subject of lively and impassioned debate.
At a recent conference at St John’s College, Oxford, an international panel of scholars discussed the artefact, the images, the map and the texts on the papyrus.