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Egypt for brewing beer.7 The receipt covers 1/4 artaba of barley or, with less probability, some other grain, like wheat or spelt, to be used in making beer. With this reservation in behalf of Amundsen's very reasonable conjecture, the new text will account for all the elements in the second line.

No. 155 (revised)

All the beer receipts recovered at Karanis9 date from the late first century B.C. or the early first century A.D., and there is no palaeographic obstacle to assigning No. 155 to the same period. It was found together with Nos. 12 1-124 and 362,10 and these have been shown to be approximately contemporary with the reign of Augustus.11 Such a date is also suitable to the symbol discussed above, taken as the symbol for artaba, inasmuch as its form is still close to the known Ptolemaic forms.

 

2.0.Mich.,I, 251

Under the special head of "Oil" Amundsen has edited a single short account, No. 2 5 1, which may be repeated here in view of its brevity (pl. IX, 2).

There is nothing in this text to betray a false reading,12 but the photograph13 raises a number of questions. At the beginning of line 1, where is followed by a doubtful , the surface of the ostracon is liberally spattered with ink, but no sure trace of writing can be discerned in that area.14 Farther along in the line, what remains of the doubtful looks curiously like , and the doubtful retains no remnant of its customary tail. In line

7. Theodor Reil, Beiträge z. Kenntnis d. Gewerbes im hellenist. Ägypten, Borna-Leipzig, 1913, pp. 1646; Pauly-Wissowa, R.-E., III, art. "Bier" (Olck), 457-61.
8. A month-name, .
9. 0. Mich., I, 362 (revised in TAPA, LXXI, 1940, p. 639) ; II, 789-801.
10. 0. Mich., 1, Index XIII, under no. 5028 E. Dr. E. E. Peterson, director of University excavations at Karanis, has been kind enough to discuss with me at length the dating of the materials listed by Amundsen under this number. 5028 E designates an area below House 5028 and belongs to the C layer in the southern portion of the hill, which is best dated in the 1st century A.D. 		    11. TAPA, LXXI, 1940, p. 639, n. 55a; p. 642, n. 6 9.
12. Cf. 0. Mich., I, 127, revised in TAPA, LXXIII, 1942, p. 66. Frequently a papyrus or ostracon text that has been misread will reveal this deficiency through a certain incoherence, but this is not always so. A false text may not exhibit any departure from the grammatical and stylistic norms proper to such materials, and in these circumstances the incorrect readings may go undetected for a long time or even permanently.
13. Ibid., p. 65, where the use of photographs in place of the ostraca is explained.
14. Amundsen: "surface badly damaged."

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