By Steven Scarpa, Photos by Andrew Melien
The seeds for the Yale Peabody Museum’s latest exhibition were planted during Assistant Professor of Egyptology Victoria Almansa-Villatoro’s first year as a Ph.D. student at Brown University studying ancient Egyptian language.
While touring the Brooklyn Museum, she encountered a collection that would shape her future research – the oldest set of papyri housed in North America. The fragments had been purchased by a journalist named Charles Edwin Wilbour in the 1890s. His collection was given to the Brooklyn Museum in 1916, where it largely sat untouched for decades.
She saw an opportunity.
“The curator opened a drawer and showed me a box full of tiny papyri from the third millennium BCE. I got so excited – then he showed me another 14 boxes. They had never been written about or been on display,” she said. “They were in storage and forgotten.”
Today, Almansa-Villatoro is studying that set of 4,300-year-old documents written on papyrus to learn more about the history of writing and ancient life in Egypt.
A first-time display of those papyri, found in Elephantine, Egypt, debuted at the Yale Peabody Museum in May. Unfolding History: Writing in Ancient Egypt, featuring rarely seen objects on loan from the Brooklyn Museum, outlines the transition from images to writing, highlights the research of Yale Egyptology faculty in Egypt, and offers insights into the lives of scribes. Almansa-Villatoro’s research provides the display with its beating heart – a sense of how the written word developed.
9 images
Click to open gallery
“Unfolding History not only gives the public and scholars a chance to see these rare documents that illuminate ancient Egyptian life, but it highlights the ways research actually works: building on existing knowledge and looking carefully at source materials, often in a new way,” said Kailen Rogers, associate director, exhibitions.The earliest use of writing developed in Mesopotamia for administration of shipping and trade. Writing was also used at approximately the same time in Egypt to describe commodities and the actions of the kings and gods.
The research process began slowly. Almansa-Villatoro spent several years photographing the postage stamp-sized fragments to ensure there was a record of them. “Sometimes there are objects that have been long forgotten in a museum because nobody had yet seen their importance or wanted to work on them. It’s important to revisit them. Important discoveries happen in museum storages.” Almansa-Villatoro said.
Almansa-Villatoro started to read them, which was a challenge. “The biggest issue is that it is very difficult to read them because they are very small,” she said. “In a way, you can think of it as a big jigsaw puzzle, and we don’t know what it looks like.”
Often Almansa-Villatoro can glean only a bit of information from each fragment. Many of the documents are personal letters, including one describing a journey. There are also household and temple accounts, and parts of legal documents. Even incomplete documents offer clues important to understanding how humans began to express themselves in writing.
A letter from a son to his father gives a glimpse into everyday life. Invoking gods and the king, the son expresses warmth to his dad. “The son says before his father, who he loves: life, prosperity, and health! May Ptah, the one to the south of his wall, sweeten your heart with life, and may your beautiful Imakhu exist before the Ka of Neferkare,” the son wrote.
“It’s through the letters where you get closer to the ancient Egyptians. Other documents can be much more formulaic and repetitive, while each letter is unique and expresses the concerns, emotions, and personalities of ancient humans” Almansa-Villatoro said.
The papyri also give insight into the work of provincial governors who wrote letters, managed estates, and oversaw legal cases far from the Pharaoh’s reach. “Knowing that there was a place in the south of Egypt far away from the capital in the third millennium BCE with so many documents, that alone is a lot of information. This is telling us that more people than we knew of were able to write and read during this time than we thought,” Almansa-Villatoro said.
Almansa-Villatoro has also included objects in the display that describe what the life of a scribe was like in ancient Egypt.
“I’m excited for visitors to see the tools that scribes used to create these documents, connecting people across 4,000 years. The papyrus fragments on loan are early documents that illuminate the written communication practices on an island in the Nile, and show the script form of writing related to the hieroglyphs more familiar to us,” Rogers said.With less than one percent of the population able to read and write, scribes held a lauded place in society. They were depicted in statues with the tools of their trade and had patron gods. Their work ranged from composing royal documents to writing about household provisions, she explained.
“It was not an office, but a kind of qualification. When someone in ancient Egypt wrote ‘scribe’ next to their name, it was as if someone today wrote 'Ph.D.’,” Almansa-Villatoro said.
A hieroglyphic inscription on the frieze of the Sterling Memorial Library from an ancient Egyptian text known as the Satire of the Trades shows how the scribes themselves regarded their work as the highest of all skills. “I will cause you to love the writings more than your mother. I will cause their perfection to be introduced in your sight. It is, indeed, the greatest of all offices,” according to the text.
Writing continues to evolve in a non-linear way, Almansa-Villatoro observed. Emojis, like hieroglyphs, harness the power of images to communicate. What Unfolding History shows is that the way we tell stories about our world changes what stories are told. “The writing system itself plays a big role in how people express themselves. You can translate an ancient Egyptian text into English, but alphabets cannot fully encapsulate the nuances of meaning inherent in the hieroglyphic system. An image is worth a thousand words, and to get the full picture you need to understand the original,” Almansa-Villatoro said.