The Tebtunis Papyri Archive of

Bancroft Library The Bancroft Library is the primary special-collections library of the University of California, Berkeley. It was acquired from its founder, Hubert Howe Bancroft, in 1905, with the proviso that it retain the name Bancroft Library in perpetuity. ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

is the largest collection of texts on

papyrus 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 a ...

in the Americas. The phrase Tebtunis archive (uncapitalized) may also be used for the papyri from family archives found at

Tebtunis Tebtunis was a city and later town in Lower Egypt. The settlement was founded in approximately 1800 BCE by the Twelfth Dynasty king Amenemhat III. It was located in what is now the village of Tell Umm el-Baragat in the Faiyum Governorate. In Tebt ...

. The Tebtunis papyri are written in either

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 ...

Koine Greek Koine Greek (, ), also variously known as Hellenistic Greek, common Attic, the Alexandrian dialect, Biblical Greek, Septuagint Greek or New Testament Greek, was the koiné language, common supra-regional form of Greek language, Greek spoken and ...

and were found during a single expedition led by Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt, two British papyrologists in the winter of 1899/1900 at the village of ancient

(near modern Umm-el-Baragat), Egypt. The papyri can be divided into three groups based on their provenance: texts from the crocodile mummies, the town and from the temple of Soknebtunis, and the cartonnage of human mummies.

Provenance

Crocodile mummy texts

A large portion of the

crocodile mummies come from the archive of the ''komogrammateus'' or village scribe, of the nearby village, Kerkeosiris, at the end of the 2nd century BC. The Menches papers make up the biggest part of the Crocodile Papyri. These papers are divided into two groups, administrative documents and correspondence. The administrative documents are long reports that detail the state of affairs of every square meter of the area surrounding Kerkeosiris. The correspondence section essentially includes official letters that were addressed to Menches by his superiors and peers in the

Ptolemaic Ptolemaic is the adjective formed from the name Ptolemy, and may refer to: Pertaining to the Ptolemaic dynasty *Ptolemaic dynasty, the Macedonian Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt founded in 305 BC by Ptolemy I Soter *Ptolemaic Kingdom Pertaining t ...

bureaucracy. There also exists a separate group of texts made up of forty-five private documents from the first half of the 1st century BC. These texts were found in five crocodile mummies that had been buried next to each other.

Soknebtunis texts

Grenfell and Hunt's first excavation in 1899 at the Temple of Tebtunis found 200 papyri. The papyri from the town are the most diverse, and they have provided us with literary fragments, including contracts, petitions, declarations, and tax receipts. Most of these papyri concern the priests of the crocodile god, Soknebtunis (

Sobek Sobek (), also known as Suchus (), was an ancient Egyptian deities, ancient Egyptian deity with a complex and elastic history and nature. He is associated with the Nile crocodile and is often represented as a crocodile-headed humanoid, if not a ...

of Tebtunis ), the central deity worshiped in the temples. These documents reveal what life was like for Tebtunis priests when

Egypt Egypt ( , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country spanning the Northeast Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to northe ...

was under Roman rule.

Cartonnage of human mummy texts

Grenfell and Hunt's second excavation, at the southwest necropolis, unearthed fifty mummy coffins where used papyri had been recycled in the manufacture. The papyri from the cartonnage covering human mummies date from the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Most of these documents can be traced back to

Oxyrhynchus Oxyrhynchus ( ; , ; ; ), also known by its modern name Al-Bahnasa (), is a city in Middle Egypt located about 160 km south-southwest of Cairo in Minya Governorate. It is also an important archaeological site. Since the late 19th century, t ...

(modern-day El-Bahnasa), a small village to the north of Tebtunis. These texts are from village officials, the village scribe, and the guards.

Two new documents from the Tebtunis archive

Two papyri have been found that provide evidence regarding two officials, Apion and Kronion, who were in charge of the village record office in Tebtunis during the first half of the 1st century AD. This provides us with more information about certain events in the village of Tebtunis. These documents have been published in two volumes of ''Papyri from Tebtunis.'' The village record was directed by Apion from 7 AD to at least 25 AD and by 43 AD it was under the direction of Kronion, son of Apion, until 52 AD.

Lexicological significance

The Tebtunis papyri frequently provide useful light on the usage of

in the

New Testament The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus, as well as events relating to Christianity in the 1st century, first-century Christianit ...

period. For example, the verb ''authentein'', "to have authority", a

hapax legomenon In corpus linguistics, a ''hapax legomenon'' ( also or ; ''hapax legomena''; sometimes abbreviated to ''hapax'', plural ''hapaxes'') is a word or an Fixed expression, expression that occurs only once within a context: either in the written re ...

in the New Testament, is documented three times in relation to "bookkeepers having authority" in P.Fam.Tebt.15 (up to 114-15 AD).P.Fam.Tebt.15
with ''authenton bibliophulakon'' (genitive plural) highlighted. Retrieved 2016-02-18. Texts from the Tebtunis papyri are referenced in both LSJ and BDAG lexicons.

Tebtunis Papyri Volumes

The Tebtunis papyri vol. I
edited with translations and notes by Bernard P. Grenfell, Arthur S. Hunt and J. Gilbart Smyly, 1902, at the Internet Archive
The Tebtunis papyri vol. II
edited with translations and notes by Bernard P. Grenfell, Arthur S. Hunt and J. Edgard Goodspeed, 1907, at the Internet Archive
The Tebtunis papyri vol. III part 1
edited with translations and notes by Arthur S. Hunt and J. Gilbart Smyly, 1933, at the Internet Archive

References

External links

Center for the Tebtunis PapyriUmm-el-Baragat (Tebtunis)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tebtunis Archive Ancient Egyptian literature Papyri from ancient Egypt Greek-language papyri Hellenistic Egypt Ptolemaic Kingdom Roman Egypt