| Administrative History | John Gavin Tait, born in Inverness in 1896, M.A. 1918, Croom Robertson Fellow at University of Aberdeen 1918 - 1921, Proof Reader at Oxford University Press, 1929 - 1939. As well as working on the collections at Aberdeen, Tait published books on the collections at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. |
| Description | Tait was appointed to the Croom Robertson Fellowship (1918 - 1921) with the aim to 'decipher the Grant Bey papyri and prepare a catalogue of them'. The catalogue was not completed or published. E.G Turner when he eventually published in 1939, acknowledged the original work undertaken by Tait
In his notebooks Tait notes that after examining the papyri, he organised them as follows 'Latin papyri, Greek literary papyri, Greek non-literary papyri of the Roman period; those which are dated in chronological order; the others arranged according to subject, Greek papyri of the Byzantine period, Misc. Geeek fragments not worth copying, Hieroglyhic papyri, Hieratic papyri, Demotic papyri, Coptic papyri, Arabic papyri, Coptic and Arabic fragments on vellum and paper, Ostraca'. |