Charition mime
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The Charition mime is a Greek mime found in Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 413. The manuscript, which is possibly incomplete, is untitled, and the mime's name comes from the name of its protagonist.
The plot of the mime is unremarkable, and is derived from Euripides' Iφιγένεια ἡ ἐν Ταύροις (Iphigeneia in Tauris), with the scene of action transposed to India. The introduction of humorous elements suggest that it may originally have been written as a spoof (Danielou 1985). The play's character makes it almost a burlesque, representing a type of drama which was prior to the play's discovery not known in antiquity. The manuscript contains signs at various points which are almost certainly instructions to play percussion instruments and - possibly - the auloi, a Greek double-piped reed instrument, which suggests that the use of music in Greek mime was much more extensive than was earlier thought (Hall 2002, 5). Whilst the exact date of the play is unknown, it cannot have been later than the second century CE, and was possibly earlier.
One of the most interesting features of the skit is the appearance of a number of Indian characters who speak dialogue in an Indian language. Shortly after the papyrus' publication, Dr. E. Hultzsch, a noted German indologist who had a strong command of the Dravidian languages, demonstrated that the words represented an ancient form of Kannada, and suggested possible readings for the dialogues in question which made sense in the context in which they were uttered (Hultzsch 1904). Although his findings were criticised by others at the time for being speculative, no other attempt to provide readings for the words in question has been successful and even Hultzsch's critics accept that the language must have been a Dravidian tongue (Salomon 1991). The subsequent discovery of the Halmidi inscription, which contains a form of Kannada much earlier than the forms known at the time Hultzsch wrote his article, confirms many of his theories on the evolution of the language and therefore adds strong support to his readings.
[edit] References
- Danielou, Alain (1985), Histoire de l'Inde, Fayard, Paris. ISBN 2-213-01254-7.
- Hall, Edith (2002), "The singing actors of antiquity" in Pat Easterling & Edith Hall, ed., Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 0-521-65140-9.
- Hultzsch, E. (1904), "Remarks on a papyrus from Oxyrhynchus", Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1904: 399-405.
- Salomon, R. (1991), "Epigraphic Remains of Indian Traders in Egypt," Journal of the American Oriental Society, 111(4): 7-16.
