The Turin Gold Mine Papyrus, the oldest map from Ancient Egypt. New literary and administrativ texts by the scribe Amennakhte (1150 BC) and the search for his archive
The project aims to finish the publication of the 2.3 m long goldmine papyrus (P. Turin 1879+). The front side shows the oldest map from Ancient Egypt showing a goldmining area in the eastern desert, stone quarries, extracted blocks, access ways, mountains, a well and a sanctuary. The nearly unpublished back side contains more than ten different texts: hymns, administrative texts, a letter to the king, illustrated invocations to the sun god and several drawings.
The papyrus shall be fully edited together with S. Polis (University Liège) and in cooperation with the Egyptian Museum Turin. The edition project was started together in Turin in 2014 (basic documentation), continued in 2016 (control of readings in front of the original), 2019 and 2020 (completion and final corrections of the digital drawings of the hieroglyphs etc.), but the final work on the monograph with the translations and comments is still lacking.
What makes the study of this papyrus even more particular is the fact that the author of the map and of several texts can be identified as the necropolis scribe Amennakhte (*1205–†1137 BC) which is extremely rare for Egyptian texts. The identification of at least one other handwriting on the papyrus raises questions about the use of documents and motivates further studies on handwriting (palaeography). A finally goal of the project is to identify other papyri of/belonging to Amennakhte which formed together with the goldmine papyrus once an archive.
The papyrus shall be fully edited together with S. Polis (University Liège) and in cooperation with the Egyptian Museum Turin. The edition project was started together in Turin in 2014 (basic documentation), continued in 2016 (control of readings in front of the original), 2019 and 2020 (completion and final corrections of the digital drawings of the hieroglyphs etc.), but the final work on the monograph with the translations and comments is still lacking.
What makes the study of this papyrus even more particular is the fact that the author of the map and of several texts can be identified as the necropolis scribe Amennakhte (*1205–†1137 BC) which is extremely rare for Egyptian texts. The identification of at least one other handwriting on the papyrus raises questions about the use of documents and motivates further studies on handwriting (palaeography). A finally goal of the project is to identify other papyri of/belonging to Amennakhte which formed together with the goldmine papyrus once an archive.