These definitive sources should be consulted by anyone working seriously in this field. This list is intended mostly to satisfy amateur scholars, like me, who are very curious but still have a lot to learn. The state of preservation of the manuscripts varies from almost complete to almost non-existent. Many of the manuscripts are made up of more than one fragment. Once the fragments had been reassembled into manuscripts, each manuscript was given the series designation provided in this list.
Some manuscripts consist of a single small fragment.
Others contain nearly the entire text of the original. These fragments were each assigned their own unique series designations. The jigsaw puzzle aspect of the assembly ends when all the available joins have been identified. The assembled larger fragments have typically been collected together based on other evidence into larger manuscripts even when no common joins existed. Some of this is straightforward and some of it is not.