Wikipedia:Peer review/Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 581/archive1

Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 581

I've listed this article for peer review because I think it's capable of attaining FA status, I'm fairly sure it's coverage is comprehensive in any event. Shouldn't be too taxing for the passing editor either, I'm grateful for all suggestions.

Cheers, Curlymanjaro (talk) 14:58, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

Oh, Oxyrhynchus Papyri! One for me, I think!

• I would rework the lead. We don't find out until the second paragraph what P.Oxy.581 actually is; the lead should tell us such a key piece of information sooner. (I am obviously biased because I wrote it, but Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1231 tells us in the second sentence that "The papyrus preserves fragments of the second half of Book I of a Hellenistic edition of the poetry of the archaic poet Sappho."). Something as simple as:

Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 581 (P. Oxy. 581 or P. Oxy. III 581) is a papyrus fragment written in Ancient Greek, apparently recording the sale of a slave girl.

• "consisting of 17 textual lines": simply "consisting of 17 lines of text"
• "The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a collection of rare manuscripts discovered at an ancient landfill in Oxyrhynchus, modern-day Egypt"; okay, literally a manuscript is just something written by hand, but I feel like it normally connotes something rather more... complete... than the Oxyrhynchus papyri. I would instead have written "...are a collection of papyrus fragments..." (which is not ideal because of the repetition of Papyri/papyrus, but...)
• "during both the Hellenistic Ptolemaic Kingdom (305 BC–30 BC)": does "Hellenistic" really add any information when we are given both "Ptolemaic" and the dates? Especially as P.Oxy.581 is very decidedly not Hellenistic.
• "the fragment signifies the conclusion of a longer message." The fragment doesn't merely signify, it is the conclusion of a longer piece of writing.
• "the President and Committee of the Graeco-Roman Branch voted to present the papyrus to University College, Dundee[...] It is the only Oxyrhynchus Papyri currently held by the university's collection" Do we know why it was sent to Dundee?
• "mounted between glass": phrasing seems a bit odd to me. I would say "to be mounted in glass" or "to be mounted between panes of glass", but not "to be mounted between glass".
• "[h]ouse-born slaves could not legally be sold for the purpose of export beyond the borders of Egypt.": what is a house-born slave? and how do we know that the P.Oxy.581 slave was one such? (This is a symptom of a potential problem with this whole paragraph, which is that it seems to be based on sources who are talking about roman slavery generally, not P.Oxy.581, or even slavery in Roman Oxyrhynchus, specifically.)

Hope some of this is helpful. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 21:41, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

@Caeciliusinhorto: Thanks so much for your helpful comments, apologies for taking so long to respond! I've taken on board your reccomendations - hopefully my implementation has done them justice. Let me know! Curlymanjaro (talk) 19:20, 23 October 2018 (UTC)