The Turin Papyrus Map: New Insights About a Complex History

The so-called "Map of the gold mines" (P. Turin Cat. 1879) is among the most famous papyri of the Turin collection (and of ancient Egypt as a whole), but it has never been properly published, nor systematically studied up until today. Most of the egyptological attention was indeed captured by the ‘map’ side (e.g., Goyon 1949; Harrell & Brown 1992), but the verso of the document, which contains many hieratic texts belonging to different genres, has not been examined thoroughly (exceptions are Janssen 1994 and Hovestreydt 1997 for col. 1-2 of frag. A, vo).
As a prelude to a complete edition of this papyrus, the goal of this lecture is threefold. First, we provide an overview of history of this papyrus since its acquisition in 1824 (as part of the Drovetti collection), and we discuss various scholarly interpretations. In a second part, we focus on the map, discussing some unacknowledged iconic features as well as its topographical and geological significance. The third section of the talk is devoted to the texts found on the verso, to the relationship between these texts and the map, and to the identification of the hands and scribes who worked on this papyrus. We conclude with a discussion of the scribal practices — at Deir el-Medina and beyond — that led to the creation of such an exceptional document.