Crossing Boundaries: Understanding Complex Scribal Practices in Ancient Egypt

Crossing the epistemological and methodological boundaries between traditional disciplines in Egyptology and beyond, the present project sets out to understand the life of a particular category of complex documents: the ‘heterogeneous’ papyri which bear several texts belonging to various genres (such as, for instance, accounts, poems, hymns and letters). They are of primary importance for the study of the wide competence and the performance of ancient scribes at work. In this project, we target the rich papyrological material that stems from the village of Deir el-Medina, which housed the families of the workmen who built the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings during the New Kingdom (c. 1350–1000 BCE). This highly literate community produced an unparalleled quantity of texts and inscriptions. Building on existing collaborations between the partners (the university of Basel, the university of Liège, and the Museo Egizio of Turin), the five main goals of our research project are (1) to document the fragments of heterogeneous papyri in the Turin collection; (2) to reconstruct the original documents digitally; (3) to study the variety of texts attested on each papyrus, to assess the numbers of scribes (hands), and ultimately to suggest individual scenarios and generalisations concerning the history of these documents; (4) to enrich the results with data coming from other ancient Egyptian archives from Deir el- Medina; and (5) to broaden the perspective by comparing, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the data from Deir el-Medina with complex scribal practices of other periods and places in ancient Egypt.