At this point we are interested in identifying the bowl's type and, more importantly, in reading the inscription. We are not at this point ready to discuss publication, etc. Working with fragments requires special attention to the consequences of fragmentation. The loss of the original context presents difficulties whether the text has been recovered on papyrus or stone, cited by another ancient author, or incompletely anthologized. The nature of these difficulties will depend on the source, as well as on the genre.
Different authors offer different degrees of precision when quoting lost texts.
Literary fragments present different problems from historical, philosophical, scientific, or mathematical fragments. Most scholars of the ancient world deal with fragments at one point or another, whether those of surviving authors or those of authors extant only in citations. Recent finds have changed our conceptions of fragmentary authors. Attention to the special nature of fragmentary texts will prevent invalid assumptions and bring new information to light. Graduate students in all disciplines who are currently working with fragmentary textual materials from the ancient world are invited by the graduate students of the Brown University Classics Department to submit papers describing their research and methodologies.