Texts from Excavations – serie

Tebtunis in the Graeco-Roman Period was a flourishing town in the south of the Faiyum osis. It was built around the temple of the local crocodile-god, Soknebtunis, and the main street was lined by the numerous houses and meeting-places of his priests. During the first half of this century an enormous quantity of papyri bearing texts and documents of all kinds, mostly written in Greek, was discovered there, some in excavations and some in chance finds. This volume makes available 53 papyri of which 37 are inscribed with texts written in the native Egyptian scripts, with 16 in Greek. Of the former, the most interesting group comprises 23 papyri written in the demotic script, many of which contain parts of literary texts; the hieratic and hieroglyphic texts are chiefly religious in character. The Greek papyri contain both literary texts, chiefly Graeco-Roman, and documents.

The Mother of Apis inscriptions (534-41 BC), found in 1966-71 in and outside the Mother of Apis Catacomb at North Saqqara by the Egypt Exploration Society, comprise the stelae and graffiti of the masons who constructed the catacomb and of the priests who oversaw the work and conducted the burial and other rituals for the cows. The texts include genealogies of the masons and some accounts of their work and rations. As well as their scientific importance for the understanding of Egyptian sacred animal cults, social life and chronology, they have a strong human interest. This study includes transliterations, translations and explanatory notes on all the texts found, together with commentaries and indexes.

This volume features all the graffiti from the Baboon and Falcon galleries at the Sacred Animal Necropolis, North Saqqara, excavated by the Egypt Exploration Society by Bryan Emery between 1966 and 1971. The graffiti includes dedications to the god Imhotep with an important historical content, and masons' marks which show some of the construction history of the galleries. There is also a Greek graffito listing the contents of dreams or visions, and a series of dedications on bronze temple furniture which mention a hitherto unknown god. Jars with hieroglyphic signs shed light on one of the main characters found in the Greek Hermetic literature, and a selection of ostraca give insights into the management of the animal cults.

This volume publishes the demotic ostraca discovered by the Egypt Exploration Society in the Sacred Animal Necropolis at North Saqqara more than thirty years ago. This site, with its complex of galleries and temple buildings, has brought new insights into Egyptian art and architecture, as well as important information about the economy and organisation of what has turned out to be a cosmopolitan area. The majority of the four hundred or more ostraca published in this volume are written on potsherds, but there are also limestone and gypsum plaster fragments and writing-boards. Collectively, they preserve two different types of text: firstly jar-labels or dockets originally written upon a complete vessel in order to describe its contents or to give directions for its delivery, and secondly compositions written upon a sherd that had already been broken from its parent vessel, or a flake of limestone or some similar material. The texts include literary and magical compositions and a range of texts which argue for the existence of a scribal school of some kind. There is also a short oracular question, various dedications to the gods of the Necropolis, an appeal to the Mother of the Apis, lists of payments and divine images, and a document of self-sale or self-hire which is probably the earliest such document so far recognised. Some of the texts date from the Achaemenid period but the majority are undoubtedly Ptolemaic with some preponderance to the first half of the dynasty.