Question : Comprehension:

Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

The Roman Empire covered a vast stretch of territory that included most of Europe as we know it today and a large part of the Fertile Crescent and North Africa.
The Roman Empire embraced a wealth of local cultures and languages; women had a stronger legal position then than they do in many countries today; but also that much of the economy was run on slave labor, denying freedom to substantial numbers of persons. From the fifth century onwards, the empire fell apart in the west but remained intact and exceptionally prosperous in its eastern half.
Roman historians have a rich collection of sources to go on, which we can broadly divide into three groups: (a) texts, (b) documents and (c) material remains. Textual sources include letters, speeches, sermons, laws, and histories of the period written by contemporaries. These were usually called ‘Annals’ because the narrative was constructed on a year-by-year basis. Documentary sources include mainly inscriptions and papyri. Inscriptions were usually cut on stone, so a large number survived, in both Greek and Latin. The ‘papyrus’ was a reed-like plant that grew along the banks of the Nile in Egypt and was processed to produce sheets of writing material that was very widely used in everyday life. Thousands of contracts, accounts, letters, and official documents survive ‘on papyrus’ and have been published by scholars who are called ‘papyrologists’. Material remains include a very wide assortment of items that mainly archaeologists discover (for example, through excavation and field survey), for example, buildings, monuments and other kinds of structures, pottery, coins, mosaics, and even entire landscapes. Each of these sources can only tell us just so much about the past, and combining them can be a fruitful exercise, but how well this is done depends on the historian’s skill!

Question:

Who were papyrologists?

Option 1: People who processed papyrus into sheet

Option 2: Scholars who published documents

Option 3: Farmers who cultivated papyrus

Option 4: People who surveyed the reed like plants along the Nile

Team Careers360 5th Jan, 2024