He was also joint editor of the Society's Graeco-Roman Memoirs from 1954 until his death. Among many other honours, he received honorary doctorates from Brussels, Geneva, and Liverpool, and was a Corresponding Member of nine foreign academies.
He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1956 , awarded a CBE in 1975 , and knighted in 1981. . The twentieth-century discipline of papyrology owes its existence to the discovery and excavation, since the end of the last century, of vast stocks of papyrus preserved in the dry sands of Egypt.
The largest single cache was a series of rubbish dumps at ancient Oxyrhyncus, modern Behnesa, on the edge of the Western Desert, 120 miles south of Cairo.
These were discovered by B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt in 1896/1897 and excavated by them during the next five seasons, on expeditions of the Egyptian Exploration Fund (now Society).
Publication of this material by the Society is still continuing in the series The Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Volume i, edited by Grenfell and Hunt, appeared in 1898 and Volume 50 in 1984 and, under the inspired guidance of Turner (since 1954) and his colleagues, these have maintained the highest standards of scholarship and production.
Papyrology has transformed our knowledge of classical antiquity.
As Turner said [1973], "There have been greater discoveries in the last hundred years (and in the sixties of the twentieth century) than at any time since the Renaissance."
Hitherto almost all of the surviving texts came to us only in the form of Byzantine or medieval copies dating from the ninth and tenth centuries A.D. at the earliest, and our only direct contemporary evidence had to be gleaned from archaeological sites and inscriptions; now we have parts, sometimes substantial, of many previously lost works, and a vast (though fragmentary and random) knowledge of new aspects of everyday life in Graeco-Roman Egypt.
The story of the discovery and exploration of this record is told very well by Turner~ especially [1980].
A papyrologist must be prepared to handle any kind of text accurately and with insight.
Here are a few examples from mathematics associated with Turner's work: Volume 1 of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri contains a wide range of material, perhaps chosen to display the breadth of richness of this find.
One example is a brief Euclid