Tracking the “scribe of the Legend of Anat” in the Museo Egizio papyrus collection: a case study in Ramesside palaeography

In 1972, Alessandro Roccati edited in the Revue d’égyptologie another witness of the
so-called “Legend of Anat,” mainly known through the version on the verso of
P. Chester Beatty VII. According to Roccati, the Turin copy of the text is written in a “très
belle onciale de la XIXe dynastie.” The handwriting of the “scribe of the Legend of Anat”
from Turin is indeed very skillfull and regular, and therefore highly recognizable. In the
framework of the international project “Crossing Boundaries: Understanding Complex
Scribal Practices in Ancient Egypt,” it has been possible to spot many other fragments that
were written a priori by the same scribe, based on the handwriting. The purpose of this
paper is to discuss, through the case study of the “scribe of the Legend of Anat,” how to
characterize a scribe’s individual handwriting. Among the fragments that are supposed
to be part of a same “paleographical cluster,” one can observe a range of
variations that include – non exhaustively – the ductus, the general shape of the
signs, their size or their inclination. Those variations let the question open whether or not
all the fragments were written by the same scribe, or could just belong to the same
“paleographical tradition,” that we can try to track in the socio-cultural landscape of Deir el-
Medina.