Elephantine Papyri

The Elephantine papyri and ostraca are a body of several thousand documents recovered from the Egyptian border garrisons of Elephantine and Aswan, written across roughly a century during the fifth and fourth centuries BC in Aramaic, Egyptian hieratic and demotic script, Greek, Latin and Coptic. The dry climate of Upper Egypt preserved the material, which began reaching the antiquities market in the late nineteenth century and is now held in museum collections spread across Berlin, Cairo, Brooklyn, London, Munich and Paris. Among the papyri, a set of Aramaic documents records the life of a Jewish military community garrisoned at Elephantine under Persian rule between 495 and 399 BC, including letters and legal contracts that offer historians a rare window onto that community's law, religion and society. One especially notable piece, a letter from 419 BC discovered in 1907 and now in Berlin's Egyptian Museum, appears to instruct the garrison on how to observe the Festival of Unleavened Bread.