Séances Séance du 16 avril 2021

– Communication de Mmes Maria Gorea, auxiliaire de  l’Académie, Verena Lepper et M. James D. Moore, sous le patronage de M. Christian ROBIN : « Papyri égyptiens et sémitiques de l’île d’Éléphantine en Égypte : la collection du cabinet du Corpus des inscriptions sémitiques ».

Abstract: The ERC-Project „4000 Years of Cultural History. Texts and Scripts from Elephantine Island in Egypt“ is dedicated under the direction of Professor Verena Lepper to a multi-ethnic, multicultural and multi-religious community, which has left behind large amounts of written material, that provides evidence of everyday life from the Old Kingdom right up to the era following the Arab conquest. Today, several thousand papyri and other manuscripts from Elephantine are spread throughout more than 60 institutions in 24 countries all over the world. Their texts are written in various languages and scripts, including hieroglyphs, hieratic, demotic, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Coptic and Arabic. The Cabinet du CIS de l’AIBL houses more than 30 cardboard boxes with several thousand papyri and fragments from Elephantine, which came to Paris as part of the excavations by Charles Clermont-Ganneau. In March 2020 the director of the ERC-project together with two team-members spent two weeks in the cabinet and could manage to open all boxes, separate, smooth, partially unfold the papyri, assemble fragments, rearrange, catalogue, photograph and even frame some special highlights in glass. Today results of the study and analysis of this material will be presented by Verena Lepper for the first time to the Academy discussing especially important pieces in several different languages and scripts.

In addition to the papyri, of which Verena Lepper will give an overview, and the archives of the four campaigns carried out between 1906 and 1911, consisting of excavation notebooks, plans, photographic plates, reports, correspondence and various inscribed objects, including more than 300 ostraca, mostly Aramaic, the latter having been exhaustively published in 2006, the Cabinet of the CIS owns a handful of Semitic papyri, written in Phoenician and Aramaic, partially edited or still unpublished, which will be presented at the AIBL by James D. Moore and Maria Gorea.