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The Elephantine Papyri in English: Three Millennia of Cross-Cultural Continuity and Change
Bezalel Porten with J.J. Farber, C.J. Martin, G. Vittmann et al.
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996) Documenta et Monumenta Orientis Antiqui, vol. 22, xiii + 621 pp., $262.00 (hardback)
With the publication of this volume, readers and researchers will at last have access to fully annotated English translations of every known written document from ancient Egyptian Elephantine. Preserved on both papyri and ostraca in a half-dozen scripts and languages (hieratic, demotic, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Coptic and Arabic), the documents span roughly 3,000 years—from the 6th Dynasty of the Old Kingdom (ca. 2323–2150 B.C.E.) all the way to the Muslim Fatimid period (909–1171 C.E.). The documents include not only religious texts but also military dispatches, legal notices and business documents of every sort. Students of the Bible will be particularly interested in the Aramaic papyri from the fifth century B.C.E.—an era when Aramaic was the language of the Persian Empire. During this period a previously established colony of Jews flourished on the island of Elephantine.
Porten and his associates present this material with a fine introduction and great detail. Each document is given a title and its vital statistics (date, size, parties, objects) are provided in tabular form. The authors further supplement each translation by offering an analytical summary of its content along with detailed philological notes.
Given the thoroughness of the overall presentation it is somewhat surprising that the authors have chosen to include only eleven plates of the original documents. Nor do any transcriptions accompany the English texts, which means that any reader wishing to check a translation must go elsewhere to find the original version. These, however, are the only shortcomings worth mentioning in this otherwise commendable publication.
The Elephantine Papyri in English: Three Millennia of Cross-Cultural Continuity and Change
