The Amherst papyri are a collection of ancient

papyri Papyrus ( ) is a material similar to thick paper that was used in ancient times as a writing surface. It was made from the pith of the papyrus plant, ''Cyperus papyrus'', a wetland sedge. ''Papyrus'' (plural: ''papyri'' or ''papyruses'') can ...

now mostly kept in the

Pierpont Morgan Library The Morgan Library & Museum (originally known as the Pierpont Morgan Library and colloquially known the Morgan) is a museum and research library in New York City, New York, U.S. Completed in 1906 as the private library of the banker J. P. Morg ...

in New York. They were acquired by John Pierpont Morgan in 1912. They are named for Lord Amherst of Hackney, who began assembling the collection in the 1860s through purchases from R. T. Lieder and John Lee. He kept them at Didlington Hall in Norfolk. The collection includes or included 42 papyri in

Egyptian ''Egyptian'' describes something of, from, or related to Egypt. Egyptian or Egyptians may refer to: Nations and ethnic groups * Egyptians, a national group in North Africa ** Egyptian culture, a complex and stable culture with thousands of year ...

written in

hieroglyphic Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ( ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters. ...

hieratic Hieratic (; ) is the name given to a cursive writing system used for Ancient Egyptian and the principal script used to write that language from its development in the third millennium BCE until the rise of Demotic in the mid-first millennium BCE ...

script; 84 in Coptic, of which only 37 were ever catalogued, the rest being described as "very decayed, powdery and worthless"; and 237 mainly in

Demotic Egyptian Demotic (from ''dēmotikós'', 'popular') is the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Nile Delta. The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and Egyptian hiero ...

and

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

, but including a few in Coptic,

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

and

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

.They were described as "Demotic and Greek" in a letter from Herbert Eustis Winlock to Morgan. In fact, the 36 of these catalogued by , included Demotic, Greek, Coptic and Arabic. Likewise, , catalogued 192 that included Greek, Latin, Coptic and Arabic. See .

List

* Astarte and the Insatiable Sea * Papyrus 12 * Papyrus Amherst 3a * Papyrus Amherst 63 * Papyrus Leopold II * Philinna Papyrus * Uncial 076

Notes

Bibliography

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