The early decades of the twentieth century were something of a “golden age” for university libraries eager to obtain some representative portions of these impossibly rare and ancient fragments of classical antiquity recovered at Oxyrhynchus. It was a heady time, too, for the fields of Egyptology and classics, one driven not only by interest in revolutionary research but also by the desire of numerous wealthy magnate-collectors to obtain the earliest fragments of the Bible and canonical ancient Greek and Roman literary works for themselves, perhaps most notably J. P. Morgan, Charles Lang Freer, and Alfred Chester Beatty. American universities and research libraries also benefited greatly from this lucrative bounty. Though generally lacking in the sorts of monumental holdings of ancient papyrological specimens that so distinguished the great universities of Europe, the golden opportunity to acquire by agreement and/or to purchase samples of these earliest texts was missed by few. Significant acquisitions of Old and New Testament fragments from Oxyrhyncus were made by Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, University of Illinois, and a host of American theological seminaries. Perhaps reflecting Johns Hopkins’s firm secular identity, the acquisitions made on behalf of the university by Basil L. Gildersleeve, the inaugural professor of classics at JHU, and subsequently by the president of the university Frank Goodnow and the university librarian M. Llewellyn Raney, are completely devoid of any biblical fragments whatsoever.

It is thought that perhaps no more than 10 percent of the entire excavated papyri at Oxyrhynchus were literary in nature, the vast majority in fact representing quotidian records of financial transactions and legal documents. Though some reveal social historical practices, many are quite humble. These include records of house sales; notes on the pasturing of sheep and goats; receipts for the sale of wheat and timber; notices of salary payments to a nurse, a scribe, and a laborer who toiled for five days at a river embankment; and, of course, a healthy number of tax receipts. Perhaps JHU’s copy of a loan receipt for 16 drachmae from Thamounis to her son Tryphon was in some way related to the collection’s marriage agreement between Tryphon and Saraeus. Slightly more intriguing is a list of several villages, among them Theadelphia, Polydeucia, and Argias; a prose description of several Thracian tribes; the title of “Choerilus’s Epic”; and partial fragments of a treatise on ethics. There are a half-dozen personal letters sent variously by Plutarches, Heraclides, Demetrius, Ammonius, Horion, and Paulus to friends and relations, and at least one formal invitation to a feast.