500 Years of Writing and Literacy in the Fayum (2nd Century BCE to 3rd Century CE): a Ptolemaic Temple Archive (P. Oxf. Griff.) from Soknopaiou Nesos

• Applicant: Dr. Carolin Arlt
• Subject Area: Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 536609580

The proposal aims to gather an interdisciplinary research group in Würzburg to study writing and literacy in the ancient Fayum through a comprehensive analysis of one key community, Soknopaiou Nesos which offers one of the largest and most wide-ranging corpora for the study of village writing practices. The sources are concentrated between the second century BCE and the early third century CE. Nearly all the Demotic documentation and some of the Greek was produced in the village’s cultural and economic centre, the temple of Soknopaios, while the grapheion was the most important institution for Greek writing. We find clear evidence for collaboration between Egyptians and Greeks and even Egyptian priests holding notarial positions simultaneously. Despite the massive accumulation of evidence (or perhaps because of it), there has been little systematic and synthetic work on this corpus. Researchers can build upon a large corpus of already identified relevant sources. However, the project members must continue to edit additional texts to gain a more comprehensive picture. Text genres pertinent to the topic include Demotic religious sources, Demotic receipts and accounts drawn up by or for temple personnel, Greek documents attesting to communication between temple personnel or the head of the temple and the Roman authorities, Greek documents relevant to grapheion operations, and texts that belong to family or professional archives. The work programme is structured in four research areas and covers overlapping historical periods. The project “A Ptolemaic temple archive (P. Oxf. Griff.) from Soknopaiou Nesos” focuses on the relationship between the Demotic and Greek documentary texts from the Temple Archive, now in the Griffith and Amherst collections, in order to produce a more comprehensive picture of the archive as whole. Of the roughly 300 Demotic papyri more than half still await publication, while the 17 published letters all need to be reedited due to deficient transliterations and translations, as well as superficial commentaries. The key question is the coherence of the Demotic and Greek material as a scribal ‘archive’. By identifying who wrote the texts for whom, in what language and for what purpose, and the matters they have in common, we may begin to conceptualize the temple as an autonomous organization within the larger context of Egyptian religion and Ptolemaic state administration. Most of the texts were written by the same scribe, a certain Tesenouphis, son of Marres, ‘scribe of the priests’ in the 2nd century BCE. The abundance of texts written by the same scribe will enable us to examine this important scribal office to find out what the exact responsibilities were, what kind of texts he wrote, and in what other ways he was involved in the temple affairs.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants