Piecing Together the Past: Yale scholar Reconstructs Ancient Egyptian Writings
By Mike Cummings, YaleNews
Photograph by Allie Barton
About 4,300 years ago, in the island city of Elephantine on the Upper Nile, a son sent his father a letter. In it, he mentions local gods as well Ptah, a god of artisans and craftsman, who was associated with Memphis, the capital of Ancient Egypt during the Old Kingdom period.
Composed on papyrus, the letter is significant both for its age and geographic origin. Elephantine was located hundreds of miles south of Memphis, where most extant Old Kingdom writing was discovered, said Victoria Almansa-Villatoro, assistant professor of Egyptology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
“This letter and other documents from Elephantine are very interesting because they don’t come from a royal or elite context as most extant ancient writing from Memphis does,” Almansa-Villatoro said. “They come from a province. They help to give a better sense of this other side of the Old Kingdom that is not in the shadows of the pyramids and a capital city that was very far away.”
The letter, which is restored from fragments, is displayed in “Unfolding History: Writing in Ancient Egypt,” a temporary exhibit on view through Nov. 1 at the Yale Peabody Museum that explores Almansa-Villatoro’s research of a large collection of papyrus fragments housed at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. The collection — an assemblage of the oldest papyri in North America — was largely forgotten after being received by the museum in 1947 until Almansa-Villatoro rediscovered it a few years ago while she was a Ph.D. student at Brown University.
The exhibit marks first time that the Old Kingdom papyri from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection have been exhibited publicly. It describes Almansa-Villatoro’s painstaking efforts to piece together and translate the fragments. It also offers a glimpse of scribal culture and the process of writing during Ancient Egypt’s Old Kingdom, an age when the pharaohs consolidated power and built the Great Pyramids of Giza.
Visitors can contemplate several papyri documents that Almansa-Villatoro has reassembled from fragments and translated as well as ancient artifacts on loan from the Brooklyn Museum.
One document records a legal transaction on behalf of the “overseer of interpreters,” a government official. The subject of the transaction isn’t clear, but the document notes that there was a witness to it and that it was dated in the season of “emergence,” when the Nile’s floodwaters receded and crops were planted, according to the exhibit label.
“This document is interesting because we don’t have a much evidence of legal procedures in this time period,” Almansa-Villatoro said. “It goes to why I’m so fascinated by this collection: It offers another side of ancient Egyptian life beyond the pharaohs and pyramids.”
The papyri fragments were purchased by American journalist and collector Charles Edwin Wilbour between 1881and 1896, when the practice was still legal. His heir bequeathed the collection to the Brooklyn Museum in 1947. The collection consists of about 4,000 fragments contained in 15 separate boxes, said Almansa-Villatoro.
As part of her research project, which is supported by a grant from Harvard University, Almansa-Villatoro has arranged to have the fragments conserved. Many of them are folded and the delicate work of unfolding them requires the skilled hand of a conservator, she said. (The conservation process is depicted in a video included in the exhibit.)
The script on the fragments is hieratic, a cursive form of hieroglyphs used by scribes to compose everyday papyrus documents. (Hieroglyphs were used for inscriptions on stone and monuments.) Hieratic is difficult to read because it depends on the individual scribe’s handwriting style, Almansa-Villatoro said. When translating the fragments for scholarly publication, she transcribes the script into hieroglyphs, which are standardized and easier to read.
A graphic on view describes how Almansa-Villatoro joins the fragments and translates them. She assembles the fragments much like one does a jigsaw puzzle, identifying edges and hieratic signs that fit together.
“I consider the color of the papyrus, the fibers, shape of the fragments, and the content and handwriting,” she said. “It’s a combination of all of that.”
About 99% of Egyptians in the Old Kingdom could neither read nor write, according to the exhibit text. Scribes accounted for the 1% of Egyptians who could. Being a scribe could be a full-time job, but some individuals performed scribal work in addition to other jobs, Almansa-Villatoro. Scribes likely specialized in writing certain documents given the vast number of signs that compose the script used to write the ancient Egyptian language, which is one of the world’s oldest attested languages, she added.
Several objects on display offer a sense of life and work of a scribe. Among them is a scribe’s palette dated to between 1570 and 1077 BCE, during the New Kingdom period. The wooden palette has a slot for a reed pen and two shallow wells for red and black ink. A close look reveals ink stains in the wells.
“We want our exhibits to tell stories in a way that helps visitors place themselves in the moment” said Kailen Rogers, the Peabody’s associate director of exhibitions. “Objects like this 3,500-year-old palette, which still has pigments on it, help visitors to imagine what it was like to work as scribe in Ancient Egypt.”
A statue on view depicts a man named Nahkt-Sais, a judge and government official who lived during the Old Kingdom, seated in a chair. A figure shown in relief on the side of the chair is identified as “the scribe Sekhem-ka.” He holds a piece of papyrus and pen. A second pen is stuck in his hair much like how people today might tuck a pencil behind their ears.
Two examples of papyrus reeds from Yale’s Marsh Botanical Garden are displayed on the gallery’s wall. A large wall display neatly summarizes the exhibit’s 4,300-year story, guiding visitors through the process of transforming papyrus into a writing surface, through the scribal work of writing documents, and into modern times as Almansa-Villatoro restores and translates the papyri fragments.
“The idea behind the wall display is to help our visitors connect all of these different moments that makeup the very long story that the exhibit conveys,” Rogers said. “And the inclusion of the papyrus reeds is a lovely way to merge natural history and anthropology.”
The exhibit includes a reproduction of a hieroglyphic inscription carved above the main entrance of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library. It reads: “I will cause you to love the writing more than your mother. I will cause their perfection to be introduced in your sight. It is, indeed, the greatest of all offices.”
The lines come from “The Satire of the Trades,” which emphasizes the importance of the scribe’s line of work in comparison to other professions.
“The purpose of this text is to make fun of every other job in Ancient Egypt except for the scribe,” Almansa-Villatoro said. “The point is to convince the younger generation that being a scribe is much better than working in the fields.”