I. THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.

1007. GENESIS ii, iii.

5 x 16.2 cm. Late third century. Plate I (recto).

These few verses from the second and third chapters of Genesis are contained on a fragment of a vellum leaf, which, like the Genesis papyrus from Oxyrhynchus already published (656), appears to be of an unusually early date. The text is in double columns, written in a medium-sized upright uncial a formal script with rounded letters which can hardly be later than the end of the third century, at any rate. A date anterior to the third century has been claimed for two vellum leaves: the Kretes fragment at Berlin (Berl. Klassikertexte v. 2. 17), attributed to the first century, and a fragment in the British Museum of the De Falsa Legatione On the False Embassy which Kenyon assigns to the second (Palaeogr. of Greek Papyri, p. 113). Of the latter no facsimile has been published, but the age of the former seems to have been considerably exaggerated, and it may be doubted whether either of them is to be separated from the present example by a very wide interval. The columns of 1007, which contained about 33 lines, may be estimated to have measured some 16.5 cm. in height, the leaf having been of a rather square shape, not much taller than it was broad, like that of the Kretes. No stops occur; a short blank space in line 25 marks the close of a chapter. Theos God is contracted in the usual way, but anthropos man, pater father, and meter mother are written out in full, and the only other compendium used is a most remarkable abbreviation of the so-called Tetragrammaton the four-letter Hebrew name of God, which in the Septuagint is regularly represented by kyrios Lord. This abbreviation consists of a doubled Yod, the initial of the sacred name, written in the shape of a Z with a horizontal stroke through the middle, the stroke being carried without a break through both letters; the same form of Yod is found on coins of the second century B.C. This compendium exactly corresponds with that employed in Hebrew manuscripts of a later period, which,