New Aramaic Papyri From Elephantine in Berlin

The island of Elephantine sits on the first cataract of the Nile River, and long stood as the southern border of ancient Egypt. In the 18th and early 19th centuries CE, Aramaic papyri documents were discovered on the island, and this prompted a German excavation to the site from 1906–1907. The excavation yielded a large cache of Aramaic papyri, which date predominantly to the 5th century BCE, when the Persians controlled Egypt, a period well documented in contemporary cuneiform and Greek sources. The Elephantine Aramaic documents reveal that this Egyptian island was a multicultural site with a settlement of Judeans and other Aramaic-speakers. The majority of the texts are documentary and provide sociological, ethnic, and cultural information that sheds light (1) on Judeans living there during the composition of the last biblical Hebrew texts, (2) on the imperial operations of the Persians at the Southern edge of their Empire, and (3) on the state of native Egyptians living under occupation. Surprisingly, an Aramaic copy of the story of Ahiqar, which is a pivotal work in the history of world literature, was also found with these papyri. The Elephantine Aramaic papyri constitute one of the oldest provenanced corpora of Judean writings after the fall of Judah (586 BCE), and compared to other large caches of provenanced Judean texts, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, the Elephantine papyri contain significantly more legal, epistolary, and administrative texts from which one can compose an accurate social history of the community. The scholarly consensus is that the present shape of the literature in the Hebrew Bible and of other important texts from Ancient Judaism took their form during the Persian and Hellenistic Periods, and as a result, a renewed scholarly interest in Elephantine and its papyri has emerged. The project proposed herein will contribute new data and perspectives to the recent debate on Elephantine and the Aramaic literature of the Persian Period by making available unpublished Aramaic papyri documents.
The objective of this project is to analyse and to edit unpublished Aramaic papyri fragments recently found in a wooden box in Berlin’s Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung (ÄMP). The material in this box, now known as the “Aramaic Box,” has been ignored for 110 years by scholars working on the Aramaic Papyri from Elephantine. Since July 2017, both the “Lehrstuhl für Geschichte Israels in der altorientalischen Welt” at Humboldt University (Prof. Dr. Dr. Bernd Schipper) and the ERC-grant “Localizing 4,000 Years of Cultural History: Texts and Scripts from Elephantine Island in Egypt” (Prof. Dr. Verena Lepper) at the ÄMP have provided funding within the framework of an “Anschubfinanzierung” for the American scholar Dr. James D. Moore (Ph.D, Brandeis University, 2017). While working in cooperation with a papyrus conservator, Moore has been able to join many of the fragments to each other, thus producing previously unknown documents, and to join other fragments to previously published texts. (A) The placement of the new papyri on published pieces significantly alters the way in which the well-known documents are to be read, and (B) the discovery of new documents advances our understanding of the Aramaic culture of the Elephantine community.