[1][2] On March 5, 1933, during the excavations conducted by Clark Hopkins amongst the ruins of a Roman border-town, Dura-Europos, on the lower Euphrates, under the embankment which filled in the street inside the wall and also covered the Christian church and the Jewish synagogue, the parchment fragment now known as Dura Parchment 24 was found.

[7] Jan Joosten defended Hopkin's identification of the manuscript with the Diatessaron, arguing from a partial agreement in sequence between the elements in the Dura Fragment and witnesses to Tatian's harmony.

[1] Parts of the leaf have decayed, resulting in some loss from the text — approximately the first five to seven letters of each line.

Classic nomina sacra abbreviations were employed by the scribe, with the typical linear superscript.

The letters tau and eta (in the word της — 'the') have unusual characters, and were written with ligatures.

[18] The last reading is supported by other Syriac authorities, by Old-Latin Codex Veronensis, Vulgate, and the Arabic Harmony, against the entire Greek tradition.

[17] The text-type of this manuscript is no longer classifiable, because of the Diatessaric character of text (likewise Papyrus 25).

[1] The surviving leaf of the scroll or codex described here, was found in 1933, during excavations among the ruins of Dura-Europos, known to have been destroyed by Shapur I King of Persia in 256.

[15] The time between Tatian's original composition and the production of this copy could not have been longer than 80 years (though it could have been shorter).

[22] Before this find, the only copies of the Diatessaron known to modern scholarship were translations into languages other than Greek—notably Latin, Arabic, and Armenian.

[23] Baumstark, on the other hand, identified several presumed Syriasms in the diction, as well as the unusual spelling of Arimathea, Ερινμαθαια, in terms of Syriac origin.