In 1893 a young American collector named Charles Edwin Wilbour stood in the antiquities market at the southern Egyptian town of Aswan and bought a sheaf of brittle brown sheets of papyrus from a dealer who could not tell him where they had been found. The papyri had been pulled out of a stone-walled storeroom somewhere on the island that the Egyptians called Yeb and the Greeks called Elephantine, at the first cataract of the Nile, where the river broke into a thousand channels between black granite boulders and where the boundary between Egypt and Nubia had run since the time of the pharaohs. Wilbour wrapped the bundle in linen, packed it into a tin trunk, and took it home with him to Brooklyn. The trunk sat in his widow’s basement for sixty years before it was opened, edited, and published. By then the contents of similar trunks had produced one of the most vivid windows that survives into the daily life of any Jewish community in the ancient period: a fifth-century BCE military colony of Judean soldiers and their families, stationed on the southern frontier of the Persian Empire, serving the Achaemenid king of kings, writing to Jerusalem for permission to keep the Passover, raising money to rebuild their temple after it had been destroyed by the priests of the local ram-god, swearing oaths by the names of half a dozen deities at once, and writing it all down on papyrus in the Aramaic language that the Persian Empire had made the lingua franca of its western half. The Elephantine papyri are the oldest substantial body of documentary evidence for any Jewish community outside the land of Israel, and they are the only such body that survives from the Persian period.
The Colony at the First Cataract
Elephantine is the largest island in the first cataract of the Nile, just upstream of modern Aswan. The Egyptians had used it as a staging post for their Nubian campaigns since at least the Old Kingdom, and the Persians, when they inherited Egypt in 525 BCE under Cambyses, did not change its function. The southern frontier of the Achaemenid Empire, where Egypt met Nubia, ran through the cataract, and the garrison at Elephantine was the principal military post of the southernmost Persian province. The soldiers stationed there were paid in cash and in rations of grain and oil. Their letters home, preserved by accident on the same papyri that preserve the rest of the archive, give a fairly detailed picture of the garrison’s economy in the fifth century BCE.
How a community of Judean soldiers had come to be stationed on the island in the first place is the first of several puzzles that the papyri raise. The texts themselves do not explain it. The earliest dated papyrus in the Aramaic Elephantine corpus is from 495 BCE, the reign of Darius I, but the community was clearly older than that. The temple to Yaho, the local form of the divine name Yhwh, which the community maintained on the island, was, according to the petition to the Persian governor Bagoas written in 407 BCE, already standing before the Persian conquest of Egypt in 525 BCE. By the community’s own account, the temple had been built in the period between the destruction of the First Temple at Jerusalem in 586 BCE and its rebuilding under the edict of Cyrus in 538 BCE, in the generation of the Babylonian exile. The papyri do not say so, but the most likely explanation, supported by the rest of the documentary evidence, is that the colony had been established under one of the late pharaohs of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, possibly Psamtik I or Necho II, who employed large numbers of Judean and other Levantine soldiers in their Nubian campaigns and on their southern frontier, and that the colony had been maintained and expanded under the Persian satraps who succeeded them.
The colony at its height, in the fifth century BCE, included several hundred soldiers and their families. The papyri name some two hundred individual soldiers by name. The community had its own temple with five stone porticos and cedar roofing, its own priests, its own sacrifices, and its own calendar. It conducted marriages, divorces, inheritances, loans, and court cases using forms of Aramaic legal language that had been standardised in the Persian chanceries and that are recognisably close to the Aramaic of the book of Ezra. The community members, although they are called Jews in the modern literature, did not call themselves Jews in the papyri: they referred to themselves as the haila yhwdya, the Jewish regiment, and to their god as Yaho, the short form of the Tetragrammaton that was common in the personal names of the period. Their identity was as much military as religious. They were soldiers of the Persian king stationed at the southern frontier, and they lived in a community that mixed Jewish, Egyptian, Aramaic, and Persian elements in roughly equal proportions.
The community’s language was Aramaic, written in the imperial Aramaic script of the Persian chanceries. The script is closely related to the scripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, of the Hebrew Bible in its consonantal form, and of the later Targums. The Elephantine papyri are, in fact, the largest body of extended Aramaic prose from the fifth century BCE that survives. They are the principal source for the grammar, vocabulary, and orthography of what scholars now call Imperial Aramaic, the dialect that served as the administrative language of the Persian Empire from the upper Nile to the Hindu Kush.
How the Archive Survived
The papyri were not found in a single cache. They surfaced in the antiquities market at Aswan over a period of years before any scientific excavation took place on the island. The result is that the corpus is dispersed across a dozen institutional collections on three continents, and that the archaeological context of almost every document is unknown. The texts are linked together only by their internal language and their dates.
The earliest purchaser was Charles Edwin Wilbour, who acquired a substantial bundle of the papyri in 1893. Wilbour died in 1896 without having edited or published anything, and his widow kept the trunk in the family basement until it was acquired by the Brooklyn Museum in 1920. The texts, which turned out to include the complete family archive of a Judean soldier named Ananiah, were eventually edited by Emil Kraeling and published in 1953. Other early purchasers included the British orientalist Archibald Henry Sayce, who bought a fragmented Aramaic papyrus and three Aramaic ostraca in 1901 and donated them to the Bodleian Library in Oxford; the Egyptologist W. Spiegelberg; Lady William Cecil and the industrialist Robert Mond, who together acquired a set of documents from the Mibtahiah archive that they published in 1906; and Sayce himself, who bought additional papyri in 1904 and published them with the help of Arthur Ernest Cowley in 1906 under the title Aramaic Papyri Discovered at Assuan. The publication caused a sensation: it was the first direct documentary evidence for the existence of a Jewish community in Egypt in the Persian period, and the first significant body of Aramaic texts from the same period.
Formal excavation followed the market rather than leading it. In 1904 Sayce persuaded the French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero to mount a brief excavation on the western mound of Elephantine. The excavation found no Aramaic texts, but it established that the mound contained the remains of substantial domestic structures. A much larger German expedition, under the direction of Otto Rubensohn and later Friedrich Zucker, dug the western side of the mound in three seasons from 1906 to 1908. The first Aramaic papyri were discovered on 1 January 1907, in the rubble of a room at the northern edge of the mound, about half a metre below the surface. The find was part of what Rubensohn called the Aramaic quarter, a complex of small houses that yielded several hundred Aramaic papyri over the three seasons. The texts were published in 1911 by Eduard Sachau in a monumental volume that remains the standard reference for the German-find papyri.
A French expedition under Charles Clermont-Ganneau dug the eastern side of the mound from 1906 to 1911, recovering hundreds of ostraca, which are potsherds or limestone flakes used as scrap paper for short notes. The ostraca, which are the bulk of the daily-life material in the archive, include the records of small loans, lists of rations, names of soldiers, and a substantial body of what appear to be exercises by schoolboys learning to write the Aramaic alphabet. The ostraca are now in the IFAO in Cairo.
The major collections of the Elephantine papyri are now held in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin (the German expedition, including the famous Passover Letter); the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (the Mibtahiah archive and many of the French ostraca); the Bodleian Library in Oxford (the Sayce acquisitions); the Brooklyn Museum (the Wilbour finds, edited by Kraeling in 1953); the British Museum; and smaller collections in Munich, Strasbourg, and elsewhere. The texts are still being edited and re-edited, more than a century after they first came to light. A modern critical edition of the entire corpus, the Elephantine Papyri and Ostraca Project, is in progress at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the editorship of Bezalel Porten and his successors.
The Letters to Jerusalem
The most consequential documents in the Elephantine corpus are the letters that the community wrote to the Persian authorities and to the religious authorities in Jerusalem in the late fifth century BCE. Three of them in particular have reshaped the scholarly understanding of the Persian-period Jewish community.
The first is the petition to Bagoas, the Persian governor of Judah, written in 407 BCE. The petition describes how, in 410 BCE, the priests of the local ram-god Khnum at Elephantine had collaborated with Vidranga, the Persian governor of the southern province, to destroy the Jewish temple. The destruction, by the community’s account, was total: the stone porticos were pulled down, the cedar roof burned, the gold and silver cult objects looted. The community wrote to Bagavahya, the Persian governor of Judah, and to the sons of Sanballat, the governor of Samaria, asking for help in rebuilding. A reply appears to have authorised the community to resume offering meal offerings and incense but not animal sacrifice. The petition is dated to 407 BCE and is preserved as part of the Sayce-Cowley collection, now in the Bodleian.
The petition to Bagoas is important for several reasons. It is the only text outside the Hebrew Bible that names Sanballat, the governor of Samaria who in the book of Nehemiah opposes the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem. The Elephantine Sanballat is the son of Delaiah and the grandson of the Sanballat of the book of Nehemiah, and the timing fits: Nehemiah’s Sanballat was active in the late fifth century BCE, and his sons would have inherited the governorship in the generation after. The petition also names Johanan the high priest, the same Johanan who appears in Nehemiah 12:22-23 and Ezra 10:6 as a contemporary of Nehemiah. The Elephantine documents thus give firm dates for at least two of the principal figures of the book of Nehemiah and place the activities of the Elephantine community squarely in the generation of Ezra and Nehemiah.
The second major letter is the so-called Passover Letter, dated to 419 BCE. The letter is preserved in Berlin and is the most famous single document in the Elephantine corpus. It records instructions, ostensibly issued by Darius II the king, authorising the Jewish community at Elephantine to keep the Festival of Unleavened Bread. The text is fragmentary, and the precise scope of the authorisation is disputed: the king’s instructions, as preserved, govern the dates of the festival and prohibit work on the first and last days, but do not explicitly mention Passover itself or the Passover sacrifice. The text is striking both for what it says and for what it does not. It treats Unleavened Bread as a festival whose observance can be regulated by royal decree, and it shows that the observance of the festival by a community so far from Jerusalem had already required, by 419 BCE, a level of formal regulation by both the Persian authorities and the priests in Jerusalem.
The third major letter is the so-called Yedaniah Archive, a set of letters from the priest Yedaniah and his colleagues to the Persian governor of Judah. The letters record the activities of the community in the years around the destruction of the temple in 410 BCE and include a formal complaint against the local Persian authorities for their role in the destruction. The archive is the closest thing that survives to a running record of the community’s relations with the Persian state.
The Religious World of the Colony
The most striking feature of the Elephantine documents, from the point of view of the comparative history of Judaism, is how un-monotheistic they are. The community worshipped Yaho, the local form of Yhwh, and they maintained a temple to Yaho on the island. But the soldiers swore oaths by a long list of deities, including Yaho, the goddess Anat-Yahu, the Babylonian deities Nabu and Ishtar, and a number of Egyptian gods. The personal names preserved in the papyri combine Yaho-prefix names like Yedaniah and Ananiah with names compounded with other deities, including the Egyptian gods Horus and Sati. The presence of Anat-Yahu, a deity whose name combines the West Semitic goddess Anat with the Tetragrammaton, is particularly striking: Anat-Yahu appears in several personal names and in the formulae of oaths preserved in the contracts.
The picture that the documents paint of the community’s religion is one in which the worship of Yaho, in a temple modelled on the Jerusalem temple but considerably smaller, was the principal public cult, but in which the private religious life of the community included a wide range of other deities and cultic practices. This picture is consistent with what is known about Jewish religious practice in the late First Temple period from the Hebrew Bible itself: the books of the prophets are full of polemic against the worship of other deities alongside Yhwh, and the reforms of Josiah in 622 BCE and of the post-exilic community in Jerusalem were specifically directed against the same kind of mixed worship that the Elephantine documents preserve in detail. The Elephantine documents are, in this sense, evidence for the religious world that the deuteronomic reform sought to suppress, frozen in time by the accident of preservation.
The temple itself is described in the petition to Bagoas as having five stone porticos on stone columns, hinged bronze portals, a cedar roof, and gold and silver cult objects. The temple’s location on the island, near the temple of Khnum, was a source of friction. The priests of Khnum are mentioned in the petition as the principal instigators of the attack on the temple in 410 BCE. Whether the conflict was primarily religious, primarily economic, or primarily ethnic is not clear from the texts. The priests of Khnum had a vested interest in the wool and other sacrificial products of the Jewish community, and the destruction of the Jewish temple may have been an attempt to divert those revenues to the Khnum temple. The community’s claim, that the destruction had been unprovoked and that they had broken no Persian law, is consistent with the assumption that the attack was principally an act of religious and economic aggression.
What the Archive Reveals
The Elephantine documents are not theological texts. They are the contracts, loans, court records, lists of rations, marriage contracts, divorce settlements, and personal letters of a military community at the southern frontier of the Persian Empire. They include the family archive of a Judean soldier named Ananiah, which preserves his contracts for the purchase of a house, his marriage contract to a Judean woman named Tamet, his divorce of a second wife named Yehoyishma, and his long-running court case against his brother-in-law over the inheritance of his father-in-law. They include the letters of a Judean soldier named Hosean, who served in a detachment at Elephantine and wrote to his colleagues about rations, equipment, and personal news. They include the school exercises of children learning the Aramaic alphabet, with the letters of the alphabet copied out in the standard imperial Aramaic sequence. They include a copy of the Bisitun inscription of Darius I, the great autobiographical text that records Darius’s accession to the throne, translated into Aramaic for the use of the garrison. They include a translation of the Akkadian Story of Ahiqar, the wise counsellor of the Assyrian kings Sennacherib and Esarhaddon, which is one of the most widely circulated pieces of ancient Near Eastern literature.
The legal documents are particularly informative. The marriage contracts preserve a level of detail about the rights of women that is rare in the Hebrew Bible. A wife could be divorced for a list of specific causes, including adultery, bad temper, and failure to perform domestic duties. A husband could be required to pay a divorce court fine if he divorced his wife without cause. The daughter of a Judean soldier could inherit in the absence of sons, although she could not transmit the inheritance to her own children if she married outside the community. The community had a written law, distinct from the Hebrew Bible but drawing on similar sources, that governed all of these transactions.
The economic documents are equally informative. The soldiers were paid partly in cash and partly in rations of grain and oil. The rations were issued at a regular rate, and the lists preserved in the ostraca give the names of the recipients and the quantities issued. The soldiers also engaged in private trade. Several of them are recorded as moneylenders, and a number of the contracts preserve interest rates and security arrangements. The community appears to have been reasonably prosperous, at least by the standards of a military frontier post.
The archive’s last dated Aramaic document is from 390 BCE, a letter from Elephantine to a recipient in Memphis, written in the first year of the Twenty-Ninth Dynasty of Egypt. By that date the Persian Empire had lost control of Egypt to a native dynasty, and the garrison at Elephantine had presumably been disbanded or had dwindled. The next datable evidence for a Jewish community at Elephantine is from the Ptolemaic period, when a much smaller community, probably descended from the original garrison, lived on the island and worshipped in a small temple that the archaeologists have located beneath the later Islamic remains. The Ptolemaic community disappears in the Roman period. Elephantine was not a major Jewish site in the Roman, Byzantine, or Islamic periods, although small Jewish communities continued to live in Aswan throughout. The great archive, the community of the fifth century BCE, was a brief episode in the long history of the island.
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The Ananiah Archive and the Mibtahiah Archive
The two largest family archives in the Elephantine corpus are the archive of a Judean soldier named Ananiah and the archive of a woman named Mibtahiah. The Ananiah archive is the principal content of the Wilbour bundle acquired by the Brooklyn Museum in 1920 and edited by Emil Kraeling in 1953. The Mibtahiah archive is the principal content of the Cecil-Mond bundle acquired in 1906 by Baroness Mary Cecil and Robert Mond and published by Sayce and Cowley in the same year.
Ananiah was a soldier in the Jewish regiment at Elephantine in the second half of the fifth century BCE. His archive records his purchase of a house in 471 BCE from a fellow soldier named Haggus, for the price of two kerashin, the silver Persian coin that was the standard unit of account. The contract names the property in detail, including its boundaries and its relationship to neighbouring houses, and names the witnesses. The contract is the only surviving record of the physical layout of the Jewish quarter on Elephantine, and it gives a concrete picture of the residential pattern of the community: a series of small houses built against one another along narrow lanes, with a courtyard in the middle of each house, with the boundary walls shared between neighbours. The same house would later be enlarged by Ananiah’s son, who is named in the documents as Pilti, and would eventually pass into the hands of Pilti’s heirs. The archive preserves, in short, the genealogy and property history of a single Judean family at Elephantine across three generations.
The Mibtahiah archive is more varied. Mibtahiah was a Judean woman who lived in the second half of the fifth century BCE. Her archive includes her marriage contract, her divorce settlement, and her adoption document, in addition to several smaller records of loans and property transfers. Her marriage contract records her betrothal to a Judean soldier named Eshor, with the standard provisions for the bride-price, the bride’s dowry, and the children’s inheritance. The divorce settlement records the dissolution of a second marriage, with Mibtahiah receiving a substantial payment from her husband as compensation. The adoption document records her formal adoption of a son, with the customary provisions for inheritance. The Mibtahiah archive is particularly interesting for what it shows about the legal status of women at Elephantine: women could own property, enter into contracts, divorce their husbands, and adopt children, all on substantially the same legal footing as men.
The other family archives in the corpus are smaller but no less revealing. The archive of Hosean, a Judean soldier, preserves his letters to his colleagues about rations and equipment. The archive of Yedaniah, a priest of Yaho, preserves the official correspondence of the temple. The archive of a man named Nathan, son of Ananiah, preserves his business records. The archive of a woman named Yehoyishma, ex-wife of Ananiah, preserves the records of the divorce settlement between Ananiah and Yehoyishma. Taken together, the family archives give a remarkably complete picture of daily life in the Jewish community at Elephantine.
The Wisdom of Ahiqar and the Bisitun Inscription
The corpus contains two non-documentary texts that are of substantial interest beyond the study of the Jewish community at Elephantine. The first is the Aramaic version of the Story of Ahiqar, the wise counsellor of the Assyrian kings Sennacherib and Esarhaddon. The Ahiqar story is one of the most widely circulated pieces of ancient Near Eastern literature, and the Elephantine version is the longest and best-preserved copy. The story tells of Ahiqar’s adoption of a nephew named Nadin, whom he raises and educates, only to be betrayed by Nadin in a false accusation that leads to Ahiqar’s condemnation to death. The condemned Ahiqar is then called upon, as a last favour before his execution, to advise the Egyptian pharaoh on a difficult architectural problem. Ahiqar solves the problem and is reprieved. He returns to Sennacherib’s court and takes his revenge on Nadin. The story is followed, in the Aramaic version, by a long collection of proverbs and maxims in the tradition of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian wisdom literature. The Ahiqar story circulated widely in the ancient world: versions survive in Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Old Turkish, Romanian, and Slavonic. The Elephantine version is the ancestor of all of these. The story itself is not Jewish in origin, and the Elephantine Jews who copied it had absorbed it from the broader Aramaic literary culture of the Persian Empire. But the discovery of the Elephantine version is one of the principal reasons that the corpus has been of such interest to Assyriologists and students of ancient Near Eastern literature.
The other non-documentary text in the corpus is an Aramaic translation of the great Bisitun inscription of Darius I. The Bisitun inscription, carved in three languages on a cliff face in western Iran, records Darius’s accession to the throne in 522 BCE and his suppression of the rebellion that followed. The Elephantine version is a partial Aramaic translation of the Persian original, made for the use of the garrison at Elephantine during the reign of Darius II, in about 400 BCE. The Elephantine version is the principal surviving evidence for the Old Persian language of the period, and it is one of the principal sources for the history of the Achaemenid Empire as seen from its western provinces.
What the Calendar Tells Us
The Elephantine papyri are the earliest substantial body of evidence for the Jewish calendar in use in the Persian period. Several of the documents in the corpus are dated by the double dating system that the Elephantine community used: the year of the reigning Persian king, and the Egyptian calendar date, with the Jewish festival calendar also indicated for the religious documents. The correspondence of these three calendars gives a unique picture of how the calendar was regulated in a community that was Jewish in religion but Egyptian and Aramaic in language and Persian in political allegiance.
The Jewish calendar at Elephantine appears to have been a luni-solar calendar, in which months began with the new moon and the year was brought back into alignment with the solar year by the periodic insertion of an intercalary month. The astronomer E. B. Knobel showed, from the dates preserved in two of the papyri, that the community knew and used the nineteen-year cycle of the Greek astronomers, in which seven intercalary months were inserted in each nineteen-year cycle. The Elephantine community’s calendar is essentially the same calendar that the post-exilic community in Jerusalem used and that became the basis of the Hebrew calendar in its later rabbinic form. The Elephantine documents are therefore evidence that the calendar was already established in its basic form by the late fifth century BCE, more than a century earlier than the rabbinic sources that describe it in detail.
The presence of the double dating system in the documents is also evidence for the bilingual and bicultural character of the community. The community used the Egyptian calendar for daily business and the Jewish calendar for religious purposes. The use of the Egyptian calendar was probably practical: it was the calendar that the Persian administration used for tax purposes and for the dating of official documents. The use of the Jewish calendar for religious purposes was equally practical: the community needed to know when the festivals fell and when the priests should be instructed to perform the rituals. The bilingual calendar is one of the things that distinguishes the Elephantine documents from the Hebrew Bible, which uses an essentially Babylonian calendar with no trace of Egyptian influence.
The archive of Elephantine has shaped the modern understanding of the Persian-period Jewish community in several lasting ways. It has fixed the chronology of the books of Ezra and Nehemiah by providing independent documentary evidence for the names of Sanballat and Johanan. It has shown that the Jewish communities of the diaspora in the Persian period were substantially different in religious practice from the post-exilic community of Jerusalem: more open to mixed worship, more integrated into the surrounding imperial culture, more willing to maintain local temples alongside the temple at Jerusalem. It has provided a baseline for the grammar and vocabulary of Imperial Aramaic, which has in turn informed the dating and study of the Aramaic portions of the Hebrew Bible, the Aramaic Targums, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. It has shown that the literary culture of the Persian-period Jewish community extended well beyond the biblical canon, to include translations of Akkadian and Old Persian texts and a substantial body of legal and administrative writing in Aramaic. The discovery of further papyri, ostraca, and inscriptions from the site continues, more than a century after Wilbour’s first purchase. The Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum and the Elephantine Papyri and Ostraca Project both remain in active progress, and the corpus is still growing. Elephantine is, in the most literal sense, an archive that is still being read.
The religious significance of the Elephantine documents has been debated at length since the first editions appeared. The traditional reading, which follows the polemic of the Hebrew prophets and the deuteronomic historians, treats the Elephantine religious practice as a degenerate form of Judaism that mixed the worship of Yhwh with that of foreign deities and that fell short of the monotheistic standard of the post-exilic community in Jerusalem. More recent scholarship has tended to read the Elephantine documents on their own terms, recognising that what the texts preserve is not a degenerate form of Judaism but a form of Judaism that had not yet been reformed in the direction of strict monotheism. The Elephantine community worshipped Yaho as their principal deity and maintained a temple to Yaho at which they offered the sacrifices prescribed by the priestly code. They also swore oaths by other deities and gave other deities places in their private religious practice. This is, in fact, the religious world that the deuteronomic reformers were reacting against, and the Elephantine documents preserve the world of practice that Josiah’s reforms sought to suppress. The documents are therefore evidence for the religious plurality that the post-exilic reforms overcame, and they are evidence for the strength of the reform itself: by the Hellenistic period, the Jewish community at Elephantine had disappeared into the wider Egyptian Jewish diaspora, and the temple at Elephantine had been replaced by the temple at Leontopolis under the priest Onias IV. The Elephantine documents thus close a chapter of Jewish religious history that began in the late First Temple period and ended in the Persian period, with the reform that produced the Judaism of the Second Temple period and beyond.
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