The Elephantine Papyri and Ostraca consist of thousands of documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Aswan, which yielded hundreds of papyri and ostraca in hieratic and demotic Egyptian, Aramaic, Koine Greek, Latin and Coptic, spanning a period of 100 years in the 5th to 4th centuries BCE. The documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives, and are thus an invaluable source of knowledge for scholars of varied disciplines such as epistolography, law, society, religion, language and onomastics. The Elephantine documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives: divorce documents, the manumission of slaves, and other business. The dry soil of Upper Egypt preserved the documents.
Hundreds of these Elephantine papyri span a period of 100 years, during the 5th to 4th centuries BCE. Legal documents and a cache of letters survived, turned up on the local "grey market" of antiquities starting in the late 19th century, and were scattered into several Western collections.
A number of the Aramaic papyri document the Jewish community among soldiers stationed at Elephantine under Achaemenid rule, 495–399 BCE. The so-called "Passover Letter" of 419 BCE (discovered in 1907), which appears to give instructions for the observance of the Festival of Unleavened Bread (though Passover itself is not mentioned in the extant text), is in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin.
The standard reference collection of the Aramaic documents from Elephantine is the Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt.[1]
- ^ Cook, Edward (2022). Biblical Aramaic and Related Dialects: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. p. 3-7. ISBN 978-1-108-78788-8.
Imperial Aramaic (IA) [Footnote: Other names: Official Aramaic, Reichsaramäisch. Because many of the surviving texts come from Egypt, some scholars speak of "Egyptian Aramaic."]… As noted, the documentation of IA is significantly greater than that of Old Aramaic; the hot and dry climate of Egypt has been particularly favorable to the preservation of antiquities, including Aramaic texts written on soft media such as papyrus or leather. The primary, although not exclusive, source of our knowledge of Persian-period Aramaic is a large number of papyri discovered on the island of Elephantine… All of the Egyptian Aramaic texts have been collected and reedited in the Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt… This is now the standard text edition.