Lives and Literacy in Ancient Egypt - Exhibition Review
By Lindsay Powell
It is a genuine thrill for historians to read handwritten documents. More than words carved in stone or printed on paper, they humanize the past in a direct way. It is a particular pleasure for historians of the ancient world because such ephemera are so rare. Often no more than fragments, what survives nevertheless offers poignant glimpses into the lives of individuals and communities from thousands of years ago.
Handwritten texts in the form of papyrus letters, parchment manuscripts, and pottery ostraca have been brought together in Austin, Texas, in a special exhibition titled Lives and Literacy in Ancient Egypt. Covering the 1000-year period from 330 BC to AD 700, they provide compelling evidence of a vibrant, multilingual, multicultural society in the land straddling the Nile under the rule of the Ptolemies and Romans.
The exhibition was developed by the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) in collaboration with the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester, England. The John Rylands Research Institute houses the majority of the Special Collections of The University of Manchester Library, which is the third largest academic library in the UK. Its collection includes nearly 2000 papyri written in Greek. Some of those prized artefacts are now on display 4800 miles away in The Lone Star State.
When Alexander the Great marched into Egypt in 332 BC, the civilization was already over three millennia old, with a bureaucracy administering all aspects of public life. Officials maintained records in Egyptian, written in hieroglyphics or its hieratic cursive form on papyrus. From 305/304 BC, Ptolemy I Soter established a new dynasty and with it Greek became the language of government. Egyptian bureaucrats also assumed Greek titles, such as the dioiketes, the chief economic officer of Egypt, appointed directly by Ptolemy and his successors. When the last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty, Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator, died in 30 BC, the administrative apparatus was taken over by a Roman equestrian praefectus Aegypti appointed by, and reporting directly to, the emperor in Rome. Though the Romans spoke Latin, Greek remained the language of the bureaucracy in the province Aegyptus. By then, Greek had become the lingua franca of both urban and rural Egypt. The exhibits on display in Austin were found preserved in the dry Egyptian sand at sites along the Nile, including Arsinoe (Fayyum), Oxyrhynchus, and Hermopolis.
For those able to afford to send their children to school, students memorized short sayings, copied fables, and were later introduced to Homer’s works. Two almost complete parchment leaves (PRylands Greek 53, fols. 88 and 93) of text copied from the Odyssey (23.82-144 and 24.18-81) were once bound into a book or codex. The complete work, dated AD 200–400, would have contained 207 leaves or 414 pages, “Or the skins of roughly 20-30 sheep,” according to the exhibit label. They reveal students doing classwork, working through meter, spacing, and the sheer physical challenge of writing.
Writing enabled ordinary people to engage with those in power. Egyptians could petition the government to make requests or to file complaints. One document (Piet Sipesteijn Papyri Collection 1), bearing the date 18 September 220 BC, is addressed to Ptolemy IV Philopator. The petitioner, Lastratos, identifies himself as a soldier and land holder from Macedon, asks the king to intervene in a dispute between neighbours. Writing in cursive Greek:
“He requests that the regional governor, Diophanes, contact the royal scribe Horos, and have him then send out a surveyor. Lastratos wants an official record of the boundaries of his and his neighbor Pantauchos’s land in relation to a public road that separates them. Lastratos is upset that Pantauchos has started plowing into the road itself, limiting his access to the road and potentially encroaching into his own fields.”
Even in ancient times, neighbours contested property lines!
Particularly interesting to me was to see a tiny fragment of the Geography (PRylands Greek 522 and 523) of Alexandria-born geographer Ptolemy (ca. AD 100–160/170). One side contains the Canon of Noteworthy Cities, a list of significant settlements across the Roman world with their geographical coordinates. The cities visible in the fragment include Clunia and Caesaraugusta (Zaragoza) in Hispania Tarraconensis (Spain), Burdigalia (Bordeaux) and Lugdunum (Lyon) in Gallia Lugdunensis (France), and Mediolanum (Milan) in Italy. The reverse side preserves numerical tables used for astronomical calculation.
Papyrus and parchment were expensive media to write on. One specimen (PRylands Greek 63 and 379) tells a unique story of recycling. Around the year AD 169, a scribe took a fresh sheet of papyrus and a reed pen and wrote an official record of land types and their rents. However, within a few decades, the same papyrus page was reused. On the blank side, a second scribe composed an imagined dialogue between the famous Greek philosopher Plato and several high-ranking Egyptian priests. Only the last part of the dialogue survives, in which a priest named Petese explains to Plato the association of each of the seven vowels in Greek with each of the seven known planets. He then indicates the celestial forces (the sun, moon, planets, and constellations) governing the different parts of the human body. The exhibit label explains:
“This distinctly Greco-Egyptian form of astrological knowledge had both magical and medical applications. It is knowledge, too, that the work’s anonymous author presents as news to Plato. The dialogue suggests that Egypt has something to teach the Greeks.”
A readily available alternative to papyrus or parchment was a pottery sherd (or ostracon); the words were written in ink or just scratched onto the smooth surface. Surviving ostraca contain letters, magical spells, medical recipes, personal notes, and student exercises. On one fragment (Piet Sipesteijn Papyri Collection 33) is text written in the first person, probably a woman addressing her lover. It mentions prostitution, youth, and beauty. Courtship — or perhaps just sex — is explained as a game with winners and losers. The writer seems to be annoyed that her lover’s attention has been drawn away from her to younger, more beautiful women.
The written word had power, especially in religious contexts. Documents preserved prayers, liturgies, and rituals. An amulet (PRylands Hieratic 50) begins with the incantation “Hail to Thee, O Bastet!” It is accompanied by a crude illustration of a crocodile with a solar disk on its head, a suitable image since the place it came from was known as Krokodilopolis (‘Crocodile City’) before being renamed Arsinoe.
A remarkable document at the exhibition is copy of the Spells for Coming Forth by Day, also known as the Book of the Dead (PRylands Hieratic 3). Prepared for a man named Padiusir in hieratic on papyrus, it dates to ca. 300–200 BC. Unrolled, the well-preserved manuscript is 10 metres long! In the middle of the Book is a finely drawn balance scales where Padiusir’s heart is being weighed against the feather of Ma’at, the measure of justice itself. Jackal-headed god Anubis supervises the scales, while ibis-headed Thoth records the verdict.
The exhibition also includes several Old and New Testament texts. A highlight of the exhibition is the ‘St. John’s Fragment’ (P52 or PRylands 457) on loan from Manchester and displayed here, in the USA, for the first time. Written on both sides, it was part of a codex that was the preferred format of early Christian writers. One side has part of John 18:31–33, the other has John 18:37–38. Dated to AD 100–150, it is one of the world’s earliest New Testament fragments. The neatly written letters are still legible in natural light.
The exhibit also contains written testimony to times of great upheaval in ancient Egypt. “It has ever been my habit to sacrifice and pay reverence to the gods...,” implores one supplicant of Theadelphia village in June AD 250, “[but] I beg you to certify my statement.” That year, emperor Decius (r. AD 249–251) had ordered all inhabitants of the Roman Empire to perform a public sacrifice to the traditional gods and to obtain a written certificate (libellus) as proof that they had complied. Although the wording followed a set formula, each document records a specific individual. One of the clerks drafting the certificates (PRylands Greek 112a, 112b, and 112c), named Hermas, repeatedly misspelled his own name, an irregularity perhaps suggesting the hurried production of these official documents.
Three Egyptians make their presence felt at the exhibition in a different way. Their strikingly realistic portraits, painted in encaustic on wood, were once part of the mummy wrappings preserving their bodies. They lived in the community of Hawara in the south-east corner of the Fayyum region. It is estimated that only 1–2 per cent of burials in the Hawara necropolis featured these lifelike portraits and, thus, were the privilege of the wealthy. (You can watch a video about one of the portraits here).
The visitor to the exhibition will have a rare opportunity to peak into the lives of people who lived in Egypt 2000 years ago through their personal writings. The curators explain that “Lives and Literacy is about these scraps of writing, saved by the environment around the Nile, and the ancient world they continue to help us see anew.” The experience is remarkably immersive and intimate, and well worth the time.
Lives and Literacy in Ancient Egypt is at Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, until 2 August 2026. Admission is free. You can learn more about the exhibition here.
