These materials record everything from high literature to documents of daily life. Except for their usually fragmentary nature and extreme antiquity, these papyri reflect quotidian affairs much as modern records do. From such documentary papyri were born the fields of ancient social, economic, and administrative history, which have increasingly displaced the older histories of kings and battles. The papyri are thus the source of a large part of what we know about antiquity, particularly economic life and social relations. Papyri are often fragmentary, not only because water and insects have done their worst, but because their discoverers and owners have cut them up to sell the pieces for more money.
Some parts are apparently still at large.
Even when individual pieces are not divided, archives almost always are, and papyri from individual localities are spread over many collections. As a result, papyrologists spend an inordinate amount of time and money getting photographs from distant collections or traveling to work with the originals. Papyrologists' traditional working tools, as in many text-based humanities fields, are dictionaries and bibliographies. But the physical images have long been the missing element. Five years ago I suggested at an international congress of papyrology that digital imaging could help solve the problem of access to distant collections, and that software would let us knit together textual data and images to form a single system.