The
Papyrus Carlsberg Collection was founded in the 1930's by
Prof. H.
O. Lange through funds provided by the Carlsberg Foundation.
The main purchases were made between 1931 and 1938, and in
1939 the Carlsberg Foundation presented the collection to the Egyptological Institute at the
University of Copenhagen with the consent of the headmaster
of the university and the Ministry of Education. Since then it has
been located in the egyptological department, which is now part of
the Carsten Niebuhr Department
at the Institute of Cross-Cultural and
Regional Studies.
In 1954 Aksel Volten, keeper of the collection since
1943, was able to enlarge it substantially through new
acquisitions, again with funds provided by the Carlsberg Foundation.
The collection further includes a few papyri which seem formerly to
have been in
the private possession of Prof. H. O. Lange and Prof. C. E. Sander-Hansen,
as well as two Coptic codices purchased from Carl Schmidt and the
Teaching of King Merikare which was purchased from Ludwig Borchardt. All these papyri are now referred to as the Carlsberg Papyri.
In
2003 the hieratic and demotic papyri in the papyrus collection of
the Greek and Latin department of the university, the
Papyrus
Haunienses Collection, were
transferred to the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection; these papyri retain
their old designations (P. Haun.).The Papyrus Carlsberg Collection is
a very rich collection of fundamental importance. Above all it
includes the largest share of the scattered material from the Tebtunis temple library.
Dating to the first and second century AD, it is the only temple
library from ancient Egypt of which substantial remains are
preserved and the immense literary material -
estimated at several hundred manuscripts - makes it by far the
richest, single source for Egyptian literary texts known to date.
The majority of the texts are written in the hieratic and demotic
scripts, although there are also texts written in hieroglyphs and in
Greek. More or less all types of Egyptian literature are represented
in the temple library.
A recent overview of the material from the
Tebtunis temple library may be found in Kim Ryholt, ‘On the Contents
and Nature of the Tebtunis Temple Library: A Status Report’, in
Sandra Lippert and Maren Schentuleit (eds.), Tebtynis und
Soknopaiu Nesos: Leben im römerzeitlichen Fajum
(Wiesbaden, 2005), pp. 141-70.
Besides the material from the temple library,
the collection includes a great number of documentary papyri
from the temple and the city of Tebtunis which mostly date to the
Hellenistic era. It further includes papyri from Edfu, Gebelein, Hawara, Hermopolis, Mendes,
Philadelphia, and Thebes.
From Edfu come two papyri which were purchased as rolls and which
are the two longest known accounts in the Demotic script with a
length of about 9 metres each (2nd cent. BC). The Hawara material
includes both Demotic and Greek texts from a family archive dating
to the 3rd cent. BC. The earliest papyrus in the collection
is a fragment of a hieratic letter from c. 2000 BC.
As of August 2005 more than six hundred
individual manuscripts have been inventoried, some of which have
been pieced together from dozens or even hundreds of fragments.
Altogether these manuscripts represent about 2,500 fragments which
have been studied and sorted over a great number of years. The
collection still includes thousands of fragments that remain to be
sorted and identified. This work is,
unfortunately, proceeding at a very slow pace owing to the
painstaking nature of the task and our limited resources.
General accounts of the
Carlsberg Papyri include:
Aksel Volten, ‘The Papyrus-Collection of the Egyptological
Institute of Copenhagen’, Archiv Orientalni 19 (1951), pp.
70-4.
K.-Th. Zauzich, ‘Einleitung’, The Carlsberg Papyri 1: Demotic
Texts from the Collection (Copenhagen, 1991), pp. 1-11.
Paul John Frandsen, ‘Foragt ikke det små for
at du ikke selv skal blive lille’, Carlsbergfondet.
Årsskrift 1993, pp.
39-45.
|
Prof. H. O. Lange (1863-1943) |
