About 4,300 years ago, in the island city of Elephantine on the Upper Nile, a son sent his father a letter. In it, he mentions local gods as well Ptah, a god of artisans and craftsman, who was associated with Memphis, the capital of Ancient Egypt during the Old Kingdom period. Composed on papyrus, the letter is significant both for its age and geographic origin. Elephantine was located hundreds of miles south of Memphis, where most extant Old Kingdom writing was discovered, said Victoria Almansa-Villatoro, assistant professor of Egyptology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.“This letter and other documents from Elephantine are very interesting because they don’t come from a royal or elite context as most extant ancient writing from Memphis does,” Almansa-Villatoro said. “They come from a province. They help to give a better sense of this other side of the Old Kingdom that is not in the shadows of the pyramids and a capital city that was very far away.”
The Brooklyn Museum’s collection consists of thousands of 3,400-year-old papyri fragments that Almansa-Villatoro pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. The documents, written in hieratic script, come from Elephantine, an island city far from the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis and concern everyday matters, such as household accounts, correspondence between family members, and legal transactions.
