ERC Project Elephantine: Localizing 4000 Years of Cultural History

Film

An important island in terms of military strategy, Elephantine is located in the Nile on Egypt’s southern border. No other settlement in Egypt has been so well documented over such a long period. Its inhabitants comprise a multi-ethnic, multicultural and multi-religious community, which has left behind large amounts of written material, which 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 right across Europe and beyond. Their texts are written in various languages and scripts, including hieroglyphs, hieratic, demotic, Aramaic, Greek, Coptic and Arabic. 80% of these manuscripts are yet to be published and investigated.