From Wikipedia

The Greeks - Crucible Of Civilization

Episode Three

Empire Of The Mind

The Constitution of the Athenians (or Athenaion Politeia, or The Athenian constitution) is the name of either of two texts from Classical antiquity, one probably by Aristotle or a student of his, the other attributed to Xenophon, but not by him.

The Aristotelian text is unique, because it is not a part of the Corpus Aristotelicum. It was lost until two leaves of a papyrus codex carrying part of the text were discovered in Egypt in 1879 and published in 1880. A second papyrus text was purchased in Egypt by an American missionary in 1890. The British Museum acquired it later that year, and the first edition of it by Frederic G. Kenyon was published in January, 1891. The editions of the Greek text in widest use today are Kenyon's Oxford Classical Text of 1920 and the Teubner edition by Mortimer H. Chambers (1986, second edition 1994).

It contains several of the fragments quoted from Aristotle's Constitution of Athenians in other ancient writing, and is doubtless the same work. The surviving manuscript begins in the middle of a sentence dealing with Cylon; some of the fragments deal with earlier Athenian history, and were presumably in the missing portion of the text. The original work was probably "written towards the end of the 330's and revised in the first half of the 320's...."

Ancient accounts of Aristotle credit him with 170 Constitutions of various states; it is widely assumed that these were research for the Politics, and that many of them were written or drafted by his students. Athens, however, was a particularly important state, and where Aristotle was living at the time; it is plausible that, even if students did the others, Aristotle did that one himself, and possible that it was intended as a model for the rest. However, a number of prominent scholars doubt that it was written by Aristotle.

If it is a genuine writing of Aristotle, then it is of particular significance, because it is the only one of his extant writings that was actually intended for publication.