More than 150,000 Visitors Have already Attended “Elephantine: Island of the Millennia”: Opening Hours Extended until 1 September 2024

24.07.2024
Museumsinsel Berlin

More than 150,000 people have seen the special exhibition Elephantine: Island of the Millennia at the James-Simon-Galerie and the Neues Museum since it opened on 26 April 2024. Due to the overwhelming response to the exhbition, the opening hours have been extended until 1 September 2024 from Tuesday to Saturday from 9 am to 8 pm, and on Sundays from 9 am to 6 pm. The exhibition will be on show until 27 October 2024.

Elephantine is an island on the Nile River in southern Egypt. This trade and border centre was home to a uniquely diverse population. Here, a whole range of languages, cultures and religions existed side by side. It is the only place in the world where 4,000 years of unbroken cultural history can be traced through written sources. Thousands of texts can be found on pieces of papyrus or clay shards written in ten different languages and scripts, including hieroglyphics, Aramaic, Coptic and Arabic. Today, they are held in 60 collections in 24 different countries, and have been deciphered in a major European research project (ERC), before being translated and digitally catalogued. In this world-first large-scale exhibition, extraordinary artefacts from Berlin are presented alongside a selection of outstanding pieces from around the world. The diverse content of the texts is contextualised by a selection of archaeological artefacts and interpreted through a contemporary lens.

The entire exhibition is trilingual, carried out in Arabic, English and German, and was put together in close collaboration with the Egyptian Ministry for Tourism and Antiquities. The first part of the exhibition located in the James-Simon-Galerie focuses on the notion of “time” on Elephantine. Taking in a broad span of time, the show illustrates the full scale of 4,000 years of cultural history, allowing visitors to interact with Elephantine by way of seven thematic islands through which they can walk. From the third millennium BC through to the era after the Arab conquest, the sources displayed here tell of the diversity of social life on the island, of the religious beliefs of the people who lived there, as well as their scientific achievements, such as those in the field of medicine. Letters, contracts, birth certificates, tax receipts, and medical prescriptions offer unique insights into these areas.

In the second part of the exhibition at the Neues Museum, the focus is on the “space” of Elephantine. A large model presents the island within its regional context. Behind the model is a papyrus thicket, offering visitors a hands-on experience with these objects of research. After a seven-year research project funded by a European Research Council Grant titled Localizing 4000 Years of Cultural History: Texts and Scripts from Elephantine Island in Egypt, more than 10,000 papyri and ostraca from the island have been digitally unlocked for the first time by an international research team. This project is presented in an interactive fashion through elements such as a sprawling papyrus puzzle. It also presents the outcomes of interdisciplinary collaborations with mathematicians and physicists, whose work has made it possible to “virtually” delaminate the closed papyri and papyrus packages, making them legible for the first time in history.

The exhibition is supplemented by a comprehensive education and outreach programme. An accompanying publication by Kulturverlag Kadmos is available in German, English and Arabic.

Elephantine: Island of the Millennia is a special exhibition presented by the Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in collaboration with the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA), funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the State of Berlin and with resources from the Capital Cultural Fund. Media partnerships: ARTE, Der Tagesspiegel and tipBerlin.