Clandestine excavation may never quite have attained the status of a national sport in Egypt, but it has none the less been undertaken there on a considerable and no doubt profitable scale for several millennia: tomb-robbing began almost as soon as there were tombs worth robbing. But it is only in the last 150 years or so that these operations have been extended from depositories of real or imagined treasure to rubbish dumps; and only in the last two generations that business in the new branch of the trade has become really brisk. Papyri have been the new attraction, and interest in them has grown as discoveries have multiplied. Vast numbers of papyri have now been found, and by one means or another more are still being brought to light. Of recent finds the most outstanding is a substantial manuscript in the Martin Bodmer collection, of which the editio princeps is just being published in Switzerland, and which is discussed in the following pages by one of its editors. This new papyrus, it seems, came from Alexandria; but beyond that, as so often happens, its provenance is unknown.