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The Elephantine Papyri are a collection of ancient Jewish manuscripts dating from the fifth century
5th century BC

The 5th century BC started the first day of 500 BC and ended the last day of 401 BC....
 BCE
Common Era

Common Era, abbreviated as CE, is a designation for the calendar system most commonly used in the Western world, and also internationally, for numbering the year part of the calendar date....
. They come from a Jewish community at Elephantine
Elephantine

Elephantine is an island in the Nile, located just downstream of the Cataracts of the Nile at at the southern border of Ancient Egypt. This region is referred to as Upper Egypt because the ancient Egyptians oriented themselves toward the direction from which the river flowed....
, then called Yeb, the island in the Nile
Nile

The Nile is a major north-flowing river in Africa, generally regarded as the List of rivers by length in the world.The Nile has two major tributary, the White Nile and Blue Nile, the latter being the source of most of the Nile's water and silt, but the former being the longer of the two....
 at the border of Nubia
Nubia

Nubia is a region in Southern Egypt along the Nile and in what is now northern Sudan. Most of Nubia is situated in Sudan with about a quarter of its territory in Egypt....
, which was probably founded as a military installation in about 650 BCE during Manasseh
Manasseh

Philip Manasseh may refer to:*Manasseh , a son of Joseph , according to the Torah*the Tribe of Manasseh, an Israelite tribe*Manasseh of Judah, a monarch of the kingdom of Judah....
's reign to assist Pharaoh Psammetichus I
Psammetichus I

Psamtik I , was the first of three kings of the Sais, Egypt, or Twenty-sixth dynasty of Egypt. His prenomen, Wahibre, means "Constant is the Heart of Ra." 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 , Egyptian language: Swenet , Coptic language: Swan; Greek language: Syene; ) is a city in the south of Egypt, the capital of the Aswan Governorate....
).






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The Elephantine Papyri are a collection of ancient Jewish manuscripts dating from the fifth century
5th century BC

The 5th century BC started the first day of 500 BC and ended the last day of 401 BC....
 BCE
Common Era

Common Era, abbreviated as CE, is a designation for the calendar system most commonly used in the Western world, and also internationally, for numbering the year part of the calendar date....
. They come from a Jewish community at Elephantine
Elephantine

Elephantine is an island in the Nile, located just downstream of the Cataracts of the Nile at at the southern border of Ancient Egypt. This region is referred to as Upper Egypt because the ancient Egyptians oriented themselves toward the direction from which the river flowed....
, then called Yeb, the island in the Nile
Nile

The Nile is a major north-flowing river in Africa, generally regarded as the List of rivers by length in the world.The Nile has two major tributary, the White Nile and Blue Nile, the latter being the source of most of the Nile's water and silt, but the former being the longer of the two....
 at the border of Nubia
Nubia

Nubia is a region in Southern Egypt along the Nile and in what is now northern Sudan. Most of Nubia is situated in Sudan with about a quarter of its territory in Egypt....
, which was probably founded as a military installation in about 650 BCE during Manasseh
Manasseh

Philip Manasseh may refer to:*Manasseh , a son of Joseph , according to the Torah*the Tribe of Manasseh, an Israelite tribe*Manasseh of Judah, a monarch of the kingdom of Judah....
's reign to assist Pharaoh Psammetichus I
Psammetichus I

Psamtik I , was the first of three kings of the Sais, Egypt, or Twenty-sixth dynasty of Egypt. His prenomen, Wahibre, means "Constant is the Heart of Ra." 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 , Egyptian language: Swenet , Coptic language: Swan; Greek language: Syene; ) is a city in the south of Egypt, the capital of the Aswan Governorate....
). Hundreds of these Elephantine papyri, written in hieratic
Hieratic

Hieratic is a cursive writing system used in Pharaoh Ancient Egypt that developed alongside the Egyptian hieroglyphs system, to which it is intimately related....
 and Demotic Egyptian, Aramaic, Greek
Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
, Latin
Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
 and Coptic
Coptic language

Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the final stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic languages language spoken in Egypt until at least the seventeenth 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 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 word is Greek language: ????at?????a . toponymy, the study of place names, is one of the principal branches of 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
Passover

Passover is a Jewish and Samaritan holy day and festival commemorating God sparing the Israelites when He killed the first born of Egypt, and is followed by the seven day Feast of the Unleavened Bread commemorating the Exodus from Ancient Egypt and the liberation of the Israelites from Judaism and slavery....
 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 museum originated with the royal art collection of the Prussian monarch: it was Alexander von Humboldt who recommended that an Egyptian section be created, and the first objects were brought to Berlin in 1828 under Fre...
.

Further Elephantine papyri are at the Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum, located at 200 Eastern Parkway , in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, is the second-largest art museum in New York City, and one of the largest in the United States....
. The discovery of the Brooklyn papyri is a remarkable story itself. The documents were first acquired in 1893 by New York
New York City

The City of New York is the List of United States cities by population in the United States, while the New York metropolitan area ranks among the List of urban areas by population....
 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 Mis?rables....
. 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 Yahweh
Yahweh

Image:Tetragrammaton scripts.svg[Aramaic alphabet|Aramaic]] and Hebrew alphabet Yahweh is the English rendering of , a vocalization of the Tetragrammaton that was proposed by the Hebrew scholar Gesenius in the 19th century....
 which functioned alongside that to 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:

'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 , known in the Talmud as Cuthim , are an ethnoreligious group of the Levant. Ancestrally, they claim descent from a group of Israelite inhabitants who have connections to ancient Samaria from the beginning of the Babylonian Exile up to the beginning of the Common Era....
 potentate, and his sons Delaiah and Shelemiah, as well as Johanan ben Eliashib. 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, historically regarded as a Ezra-Nehemiah of the Book of Ezra, and is sometimes called the second book of Ezra....
, , . The response, if any, is unknown.

By the middle of the fourth century BCE the Temple at Elephantine had ceased to function.

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 Muffs (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

  • (from the Internet Archive
    Internet Archive

    The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free and openly accessible online digital library, including an archive site of the World Wide Web....
     because original site was deleted)