Elephantine papyri
Encyclopedia
The Elephantine Papyri are a collection of ancient Jewish manuscripts dating from the 5th century BC. They come from a Jewish community at Elephantine
, then called Yeb, the island in the Nile
at the border of Nubia
, which was probably founded as a military installation in about 650 BC during Manasseh
's reign to assist Pharaoh Psammetichus I
in his Nubian campaign. The dry soil of Upper Egypt preserved documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Syene (Aswan
). Hundreds of these Elephantine papyri, written in hieratic
and Demotic Egyptian, Aramaic, Greek
, Latin
and Coptic
, span a period of 1000 years. Legal documents and a cache of letters survived, turned up on the local 'gray market' of antiquities starting in the late 19th century, and were scattered into several Western collections.
Though some fragments on papyrus
are much older, the largest number of papyri are written in Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Persian Empire, and document the Jewish community among soldiers stationed at Elephantine under Persian rule, 495-399 BCE. The Elephantine documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives: divorce documents, the manumission of slaves, and other business, and are a valuable source of knowledge about law, society, religion, language and onomastics
, the sometimes surprisingly revealing study of names.
The 'Passover letter' of 419 BCE (discovered in 1907), which gives detailed instructions for properly keeping Passover
is in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin
.
Further Elephantine papyri are at the Brooklyn Museum
. The discovery of the Brooklyn papyri is a remarkable story itself. The documents were first acquired in 1893 by New York
journalist Charles Edwin Wilbour
. After lying in a warehouse for more than 50 years, the papyri were shipped to the Egyptian Department of the Brooklyn Museum. It was at this time that scholars finally realized that "Wilbour had acquired the first Elephantine papyri".
which functioned alongside that of the local ram-headed deity, Khnum.
The "Petition to Bagoas" (Sayce-Cowley collection) is a letter written in 407 BCE to Bagoas
, the Persian governor of Judea, appealing for assistance in rebuilding the Jewish temple in Elephantine, which had recently been badly damaged by an anti-Semitic rampage on the part of a segment of the Elephantine community.
In the course of this appeal, the Jewish inhabitants of Elephantine speak of the antiquity of the damaged temple:
The community also appealed for aid to Sanballat I, a Samaritan
potentate, and his sons Delaiah and Shelemiah, as well as Johanan ben Eliashib
. Both Sanballat and Johanan are mentioned in the Book of Nehemiah
, , .
There was a response of both governors (Bagoas and Delaiah) which gave the permission to rebuild the temple written in the form of a memorandum:
"1Memorandum of what Bagohi and Delaiah said 2to me, saying: Memorandum: You may say in Egypt ... 8to (re)build it on its site as it was formerly...".
By the middle of the 4th century BCE, the Temple at Elephantine had ceased to function. There is evidence from excavations that the rebuilding and enlargement of the Khnum temple under Nectanebo II
(360-343) took the place of the former Temple of YHWH.
In 2004, the Brooklyn Museum of Art created a display entitled "Jewish Life in Ancient Egypt: A Family Archive From the Nile Valley," which featured the interfaith couple of Ananiah, an official at the Temple of Yahou (a.k.a. Yahweh), and his wife, Tamut, who was previously an Egyptian slave owned by a Jewish master, Meshullam.
Some related exhibition didactics of 2002 included comments about significant structural similarities between Judaism
and the ancient Egyptian religion and how they easily coexisted and blended at Elephantine and that the segregation and isolation formulated by zealous Jewish leadership and scripture was not formalized and imposed until many centuries later.
Elephantine
Elephantine is an island in the River Nile, located just downstream of the First Cataract at the southern border of Ancient Egypt. This region is referred to as Upper Egypt because the land is higher than that near the Mediterranean coast. The island may have received its name because it was a...
, then called Yeb, the island in the Nile
Nile
The Nile is a major north-flowing river in North Africa, generally regarded as the longest river in the world. It is long. It runs through the ten countries of Sudan, South Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Egypt.The Nile has two major...
at the border of Nubia
Nubia
Nubia is a region along the Nile river, which is located in northern Sudan and southern Egypt.There were a number of small Nubian kingdoms throughout the Middle Ages, the last of which collapsed in 1504, when Nubia became divided between Egypt and the Sennar sultanate resulting in the Arabization...
, which was probably founded as a military installation in about 650 BC during Manasseh
Manasseh of Judah
Manasseh was a king of the Kingdom of Judah. He was the only son of Hezekiah with Hephzi-bah. He became king at an age 12 years and reigned for 55 years. Edwin Thiele has concluded that he commenced his reign as co-regent with his father Hezekiah in 697/696 BC, with his sole reign beginning in...
's reign to assist Pharaoh Psammetichus I
Psammetichus I
Psamtik I , was the first of three kings of that name of the Saite, or Twenty-sixth dynasty of Egypt. His prenomen, Wah-Ib-Re, means "Constant [is the] Heart [of] Re." The story in Herodotus of the Dodecarchy and the rise of Psamtik is fanciful...
in his Nubian campaign. The dry soil of Upper Egypt preserved documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Syene (Aswan
Aswan
Aswan , formerly spelled Assuan, is a city in the south of Egypt, the capital of the Aswan Governorate.It stands on the east bank of the Nile at the first cataract and is a busy market and tourist centre...
). Hundreds of these Elephantine papyri, written in hieratic
Hieratic
Hieratic refers to a cursive writing system that was used in the provenance of the pharaohs in Egypt and Nubia that developed alongside the hieroglyphic system, to which it is intimately related...
and Demotic Egyptian, Aramaic, Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
, Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
and Coptic
Coptic language
Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the current stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century...
, span a period of 1000 years. Legal documents and a cache of letters survived, turned up on the local 'gray market' of antiquities starting in the late 19th century, and were scattered into several Western collections.
Though some fragments on papyrus
Papyrus
Papyrus is a thick paper-like material produced from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland sedge that was once abundant in the Nile Delta of Egypt....
are much older, the largest number of papyri are written in Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Persian Empire, and document the Jewish community among soldiers stationed at Elephantine under Persian rule, 495-399 BCE. The Elephantine documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives: divorce documents, the manumission of slaves, and other business, and are a valuable source of knowledge about law, society, religion, language and onomastics
Onomastics
Onomastics or onomatology is the study of proper names of all kinds and the origins of names. The words are from the Greek: "ὀνομαστικός" , "of or belonging to naming" and "ὀνοματολογία" , from "ὄνομα" "name". Toponymy or toponomastics, the study of place names, is one of the principal branches of...
, the sometimes surprisingly revealing study of names.
The 'Passover letter' of 419 BCE (discovered in 1907), which gives detailed instructions for properly keeping Passover
Passover
Passover is a Jewish holiday and festival. It commemorates the story of the Exodus, in which the ancient Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt...
is in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin
Egyptian Museum of Berlin
The Egyptian Museum of Berlin is home to one of the world's most important collections of Ancient Egyptian artifacts.The collection is part of the Neues Museum.-History:...
.
Further Elephantine papyri are at the Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an encyclopedia art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum holds New York City's second largest art collection with roughly 1.5 million works....
. The discovery of the Brooklyn papyri is a remarkable story itself. The documents were first acquired in 1893 by New York
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
journalist Charles Edwin Wilbour
Charles Edwin Wilbour
Charles Edwin Wilbour was an American journalist and Egyptologist. He was one of the discoverers of the Elephantine Papyri. He produced the first American translation of Les Misérables.-Biography:...
. After lying in a warehouse for more than 50 years, the papyri were shipped to the Egyptian Department of the Brooklyn Museum. It was at this time that scholars finally realized that "Wilbour had acquired the first Elephantine papyri".
Jewish temple at Elephantine
The Jews had their own Temple to YahwehYahweh
Yahweh is the name of God in the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jews and Christians.The word Yahweh is a modern scholarly convention for the Hebrew , transcribed into Roman letters as YHWH and known as the Tetragrammaton, for which the original pronunciation is unknown...
which functioned alongside that of the local ram-headed deity, Khnum.
The "Petition to Bagoas" (Sayce-Cowley collection) is a letter written in 407 BCE to Bagoas
Bagoas
Bagoas was a eunuch who became the vizier to Artaxerxes III. In this role, he allied himself with the Rhodian mercenary general Mentor, and with his help succeeded in once again making Egypt a province of the Persian Empire...
, the Persian governor of Judea, appealing for assistance in rebuilding the Jewish temple in Elephantine, which had recently been badly damaged by an anti-Semitic rampage on the part of a segment of the Elephantine community.
In the course of this appeal, the Jewish inhabitants of Elephantine speak of the antiquity of the damaged temple:
- 'Now our forefathers built this temple in the fortress of Elephantine back in the days of the kingdom of Egypt, and when Cambyses came to Egypt he found it built. They (the Persians) knocked down all the temples of the gods of Egypt, but no one did any damage to this temple."
The community also appealed for aid to Sanballat I, a Samaritan
Samaritan
The Samaritans are an ethnoreligious group of the Levant. Religiously, they are the adherents to Samaritanism, an Abrahamic religion closely related to Judaism...
potentate, and his sons Delaiah and Shelemiah, as well as Johanan ben Eliashib
Johanan (High Priest)
Johanan , son of Joiada, was the fifth Jewish high priest after the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem by the Jews who had returned from the Babylonian captivity. His reign is estimated to have been from c. 410-371 BCE; he was succeeded by his son Jaddua. The bible gives no details about his life...
. Both Sanballat and Johanan are mentioned in the Book of Nehemiah
Book of Nehemiah
The Book of Nehemiah is a book of the Hebrew Bible. Told largely in the form of a first-person memoir, it concerns the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem by Nehemiah, a Jew who is a high official at the Persian court, and the dedication of the city and its people to God's laws...
, , .
There was a response of both governors (Bagoas and Delaiah) which gave the permission to rebuild the temple written in the form of a memorandum:
"1Memorandum of what Bagohi and Delaiah said 2to me, saying: Memorandum: You may say in Egypt ... 8to (re)build it on its site as it was formerly...".
By the middle of the 4th century BCE, the Temple at Elephantine had ceased to function. There is evidence from excavations that the rebuilding and enlargement of the Khnum temple under Nectanebo II
Nectanebo II
Nectanebo II was the third and last pharaoh of the Thirtieth dynasty, as well as the last native ruler of Ancient Egypt. Under Nectanebo II Egypt prospered...
(360-343) took the place of the former Temple of YHWH.
In 2004, the Brooklyn Museum of Art created a display entitled "Jewish Life in Ancient Egypt: A Family Archive From the Nile Valley," which featured the interfaith couple of Ananiah, an official at the Temple of Yahou (a.k.a. Yahweh), and his wife, Tamut, who was previously an Egyptian slave owned by a Jewish master, Meshullam.
Some related exhibition didactics of 2002 included comments about significant structural similarities between Judaism
Judaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
and the ancient Egyptian religion and how they easily coexisted and blended at Elephantine and that the segregation and isolation formulated by zealous Jewish leadership and scripture was not formalized and imposed until many centuries later.
Further reading
- Emil G. Kraeling, The Brooklyn Museum Aramaic Papyri, 1953, Yale University Press.
- Bezalel Porten, with J.J. Farber, C.J. Martin, G. Vittman, editors. 1996. The Elephantine Papyri in English: Three Millennia of Cross-Cultural Continuity and Change, (Brill Academic)
- Bezalel Porten, Archives from Elephantine: The Life of an Ancient Jewish Military Colony, 1968. (Berkeley: University of California Press)
- Yochanan MuffsYochanan MuffsYochanan Muffs was an American-Jewish professor of the Bible and religion at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.-Biography:...
(Prolegomenon by Baruch A. Levine), 2003. Studies in the Aramaic Legal Papyri from Elephantine (Brill Academic) - A. van Hoonacker, Une Communauté Judéo-Araméenne à Éléphantine, en Égypte aux VIe et Ve siècles av. J.-C., 1915, London, The Schweich Lectures
- Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt, 1995, Jewish Publication Society
External links
- http://books.google.nl/books?id=qdrO1O5UcD0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Elephantine+Papyri&source=bl&ots=o5QZ7wTotG&sig=EFhKjVfuYPFHAo3Ir4eYmivT61M&hl=nl&ei=ze5CTPfOAsuoOP2XoM4M&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CDcQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=falseThe Elephantine papyri in English: Three Millennia of Cross-Cultural Continuity and Change. Bezalel Porten e.a.. Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands, 1996.] Retrieved 18 July 2010.
- Introduction and text of the 'Passover Papyrus' contained in the Elephantine papyri. (from the Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
because original site was deleted) - A Passover Letter.
- P.Eleph.: Aegyptische Urkunden aus den königlichen Museen in Berlin
- P.Eleph.Wagner: Elephantine XIII: Les papyrus et les ostraca grecs d'Elephantine
- COJS: The Elephantine Temple, 407 BCE