Papyrus Rylands 458
Eight small fragments of a papyrus roll of Deuteronomy in Greek, written in Egypt in the second century BC. They are among the oldest surviving pieces of the Septuagint.
The fragments come from four columns of a roll and carry parts of Deuteronomy 23–28. They were recovered from the cartonnage of a mummy, the pasted waste papyrus used for mummy casings, and were acquired by the John Rylands Library in 1917. The library dates the roll to the second century BC from its formal handwriting and from the documentary hand on the back.
The papyrus shows that a Greek Deuteronomy was being copied in Egypt within about a century of the time in which the Letter of Aristeas sets the translation. It is too small to show more than that. See the Hebrew Scriptures Are Translated into Greek.
Cited in
- about 250 BC, estimated date