new ground in linking the Biblical Greek to its roots in contemporary vernacular was H. A. A. Kennedy's Sources of N. T. Greek, though the true nature of the phenomena there classified could not be understood till a new method had been disclosed. This was done in the pioneer work of Adolf Deissmann.? His Bible Studies showed that the non-literary papyri of Egypt supplied for the first time exact parallels to the Greek of the N. T., which was therefore simply the vernacular of the Greek-speaking peoples of the Roman Empire. Since Deissmann's book appeared, there has been a rush to the papyri on the part of N. T. scholars, who are finding in them new and welcome light on many problems of exegesis, especially where lexical definition is needed. Dean Armitage Robinson's commentary on Ephesians is a conspicuous example of the use of the new material. Even more thoroughgoing in the wealth of its illustrative material is the forthcoming volume on Thessalonians in the same series, by Dr. George Milligan. For an application of Deissmann's principle to the grammar of N. T. Greek, and a description of Hellenistic in the modern lights drawn from Comparative Philology and the study of inscriptions, papyri, and the Modern Greek vernacular, I may be allowed to refer to my own Grammar of N. T. Greek (2nd ed., 1906). The student should not miss the little book in which Deissmann has just been summing up the present position of research on N. T. Greek, and describing material, mostly lexical, which has accumulated since his Bible Studies appeared.

3

The survey of the present article must-for reasons of space-be limited to the Greek of the period between Alexander the Great and the Byzantine era. For scientific research of course no limits can be set. He who would

1 T. & T. Clark, 1895.

2 Bibelstudien; 1895, Neue Bibelstudien, 1897 (E. T. by A. Grieve, T. & T. Clark, 1901). 3 Macmillan, 1903.

Vol. i., Prolegomena (T. & T. Clark).

5 New Lights on the New Testament (T. & T. Clark, 1907).

really know Hellenistic must be at home in the Epic and in Herodotus, and in the vernacular dialects of modern Greece. The importance of the last-named study cannot be exaggerated. The artificial Greek of the schools has little to teach us; but the vulgar dialects of the common people are the direct descendants of the Kown of the first century. And Prof. Thumb has shown how the modern dialects may preserve traces of dialects in the Kown. Their characteristic marks may enable us to detect the provenance of disputed writings, or of MSS. the localising of which is necessary in the interests of textual criticism. Great things may be hoped of the scientific study of vernacular dialects, especially in the more remote districts of Greece and the Greek-speaking world, which is now being conducted by the Director of the British School at Athens.

We proceed to survey first the materials on which a student of the Kowý may employ himself. The importance of the non-literary papyri has been described, and some acquaintance with their language and form is a first requisite for any serious investigator to-day. The present year has seen the publication of a little volume in the Teubner series which puts a working knowledge of the colloquial Greek of the Ptolemaic period within everyone's reach it is a complete collection of all private letters prior to the Roman age, admirably edited with notes and indices. The book would be exceedingly interesting to a sixth form as an adjunct to their Greek Testament class. A yet smaller selection of papyri, contained in a sixpenny booklet with German notes, would supply enough to quicken greatly the intelligent schoolboy's interest in a kind of Greek which the classical master is prone to present to him

See especially the work named below; also my Prolegomena, pp. 38-41. Thumb has added some suggestive facts in an important article in Neue Jahrbücher f. d. klass. Altertum, xv. (1905), 385 ff.

2

Epistulae Privatae Graecae quae in papyris aetatis Lagidarum servantur. Ed. Stanislaus Witkowski (Teubner, 1907).

3 Griechische Papyri ausgewählt und erklärt. Von Lic. Hans Lietzmann. (In Lietzmann's Kleine Texte, Bonn, 1905: A. Marcus & E. Weber.)

2

4

only as a fearful example of what he must shun. For scholars who wish to press further into a field which calls loudly for harvesters, the library of sumptuous collections of papyri grows apace.1 Drs. Grenfell and Hunt maintain their amazing output with spade and with pen, having added a big new volume of Tebtunis Papyri during the year; while more treasures from the British Museum have been published under Dr. F. G. Kenyon's name.3 Collections from Strassburg, Leipzig, and Florence have come to us during the year, and the Berlin editors have added a section or two to their fourth volume. The commercial ostraka in Wilcken's monumental corpus need attention; and a mass of late Greek, exceptionally free from any taint of literary style, meets us in Audollent's collection of curses. Next stand the inscriptions, though as a source for genuine colloquial Hellenistic they are decidedly less trustworthy, tending to run into formulae and into more or less stilted phraseology. Against this disadvantage may be set the fact that they come from all parts of the Hellenist world, and can be used therefore, when their language agrees with that of the Egyptian papyri, to demonstrate the essential unity of the Common Greek wherever spoken. For inscriptions of the Hellenistic period the student may use Dittenberger's excellent selection, which includes a large number of them, together with those of earlier date. But there is also now a corpus of Hellenistic inscriptions from the eastern Greek-speaking lands, equipped

5

1 Complete information as to the publications of papyri will be found in Ulrich Wilcken's periodical, Archiv für Papyrusforschung, now in its fourth volume. A convenient list of publications up to the middle of 1906 may be found in my Prolegomena, pp. 259-262, 283. * University of California Publications (Henry Frowde, 1907).

3 Greek Papyri in the British Museum, vol. iii., by F. G. Kenyon and H. I. Bell.

♦ Griechische Ostraka, two vols., by U. Wilcken (Leipzig, 1899).

5 Defixionum Tabellae, by A. Audollent (Paris, 1904).

6 Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum, ed. 2, by W. Dittenberger. Three vols. (Leipzig, 1901).

with the same wealth of commentary, and the invaluable indices which form so striking a feature in the editor's earlier Sylloge.1 I must not dwell here on the use which the student of the Common Greek makes of the vast literature produced in its period, but mostly built with antiquarian zeal upon classical models; nor again on our gratitude to the pedants of Atticism, like Phrynichus, who so vehemently tell their readers what to avoid, and thereby show us what the living language contained. Outside the Greek Bible there is little enough written which reveals to reveals to us the genuine language of daily life. But the reading of such a document as Usener's Pelagia legends will show us how an illiterate hagiology may give us sometimes a welcome glimpse into the vernacular of its time.

2

The systematic sifting of all this material has produced a great amount of painstaking research work, hailing mostly from beyond the Rhine. Full and careful bibliographies may be consulted, as those by Thumb,3 Deissmann,1 and Hohlwein. It will be well to mention some of the most outstanding works which have appeared in Germany during the last few years. The Einleitung in die neugriechische Grammatik of the distinguished Athenian savant, G. N. Hatzidakis, is so fundamental that it must be named here, although no longer recent. Among other general works must be especially mentioned A. Thumb's very important Hellenismus, which is I believe shortly to be translated. Paul Kretschmer's brilliant tract on the origin of the Kowń

1 Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones Selectae, by the same. Two vols. (Leipzig, 1905).

"Legenden d. hl. Pelagia, by H. Usener (Bonn, 1879).

8

3 In Archiv f. Papyrusforschung, vol. iii. 443 ff., and earlier in the Anzeiger to Brugmann and Streitberg's Indogermanische Forschungen. 4 Theologische Rundschau, 1906, pp. 210 ff.

6

5 La Papyrologie grecque (up to the end of 1904), by N. Hohlwein (Louvain, 1905). Leipzig, Breitkopf, 1892. 1 Die griech. Sprache im Zeitalter des Hellenismus (Strassburg, Trübner, 1901).

8 Die Entstehung der Kown. In Sitzungsbericht d. kais. Akad. in Wien, 1900: Phil. Hist. Classe, cxliii.

should be consulted, though its conclusions are far from indisputable. Among general works, by the way, A. N. Jannaris' Historical Greek Grammar1 should not be omitted, though it is neither recent nor German, and does not therefore belong to this section: it contains a great mass of material, but needs caution in the handling. Finally may be named a brief sketch by a master in comparative linguistic, Prof. J. Wackernagel, who writes on the history of the Greek language in the new encyclopaedic work, Die Kultur der Gegenwart.2

The most important monographs dealing with a part of the field must be named in conclusion. E. Schweizer (now Schwyzer) published in 1898 a prize treatise on the grammar of the Pergamene inscriptions, which has been well followed up by E. Nachmanson on those from Magnesia. Unfortunately both writers stop short of syntax, as does E. Mayser in his new and indispensable grammar of the Ptolemaic papyri, and W. Crönert in the minute survey of the forms found in the Herculaneum rolls." On the literary writers of the Kown we may cite Kälker on Polybius,' Schmidt on Josephus, Reinhold De Graecitate Patrum, Schmid on the Atticists,10 etc. For syntax we have still to depend mainly on special N. T. grammars, as Blass (see above), Burton," and Winer-Schmiedel.12 The last named

1 Macmillan, 1897.

8

'Teil i., Abteilung viii., pp. 286 ff. (esp. pp. 298-305). See also in the same volume Wilamowitz on the literature of 320 B.c. to 529 A.D., and Krumbacher on that of the mediaeval age.

3 Grammatik der pergamenischen Inschriften (Berlin, 1898).

4 Laute und Formen der magnetischen Inschriften (Uppsala and Leipzig, 1903).

5 Gramm. der griech. Papyri aus der Ptolemäerzeit (Teubner, 1906).

6 Memoria Graeca Herculanensis (Teubner, 1903).

1 Leipziger Studien III. ii. (1880).

8 De Flavi Josephi elocutione (Leipzig, 1893).

10 Der Atticismus, 4 vols. (Stuttgart, 1887-1897).

9 Halle, 1898.

11 New Testament Moods and Tenses (T. & T. Clark, 2nd edition, 1894). 12 G. B. Winer's Grammatik des ntlichen Sprachidioms (8te Auflage, Göttingen, 1894 ff.).