The Austrian capital Vienna is one of the few Western European capital cities that does not have a major collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities. London, Paris, Berlin – all these boast ancient Egyptian collections of international importance as a result of purchasing and excavation campaigns in Egypt that started, in the French and British cases, as early as the end of the 18th century.

However, the Austrians seem to have been slower off the mark, with the result that Vienna does not have ancient Egyptian collections to match those in the British Museum in London, the Louvre Museum in Paris, and the Neues Museum in Berlin, to say nothing of the equally important collections in Italy and Holland at, respectively, the Egyptian Museum in Turin and the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden.

However, while Vienna does not have a major museum of ancient Egyptian antiquities to match those in many other European capitals, it does have an internationally recognised collection of ancient Egyptian papyrus. A visit to this institution, the Papyrus Museum of the Austrian National Library, is well worth a place on any itinerary in the city.

Located in the depths of the New Hofburg Palace in the centre of Vienna, the Museum can be easily overlooked, particularly by visitors following the more regular tourist trail that focuses mostly on late 18th-century Vienna, the city of composers Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn, and early 20th-century Vienna, associated with painters Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, the Second Viennese School of composers, the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, and the Vienna Circle of philosophers.

The Papyrus Museum can appear a bit out on a limb to those following this itinerary and even more so owing to its location in the New Hofburg, a vast wedding cake of a building that was once part of the complex that made up the official residence of the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Venturing into this today, now used to house various museums, it can be easy to get sidetracked amidst the different possibilities on offer, from the apartments used by the former ruling family, mostly in the adjacent Old Hofburg, to the recent addition of an exhibition on modern Austrian history.

Determined visitors will want to head down into the basement of the New Hofburg, however, where the Papyrus Museum exhibition opens with a presentation of ancient Egyptian inks and writing implements and an account of the manufacture of the papyrus writing surface itself from the dried and flattened pith of the papyrus plant, a species of aquatic sedge that once grew throughout Egypt along the banks of the Nile.

At least as far back as the 1st Dynasty in the middle of the third millennium BCE, the ancient Egyptians discovered that papyrus could be used to make an organic writing surface that was tough and versatile and that could be stuck together to make continuous strips that could then be rolled up and stored in the form of scrolls. In so doing, they introduced a technology that later spread throughout the Mediterranean region and beyond, replacing other less versatile media such as the clay tablets that were used to write on in ancient Mesopotamia.

While papyrus eventually gave way to parchment, made from animal skins, and the scroll was also eventually replaced by the codex, or bound book that we are familiar with today, it was nevertheless used as the main writing surface for the best part of three millennia. It is no exaggeration to say that without papyrus there would be no ancient Greek philosophy, no religious texts from antiquity, not least those of the early Christians, and no recorded ancient Greek and Roman history.

While all these materials eventually made it onto parchment and then onto paper as a result of hundreds if not thousands of years of copying, originally they were written on papyrus. For their survival we owe a huge vote of thanks to the ancient Egyptians.

 

Vienna collection: The collection of the Vienna Papyrus Museum contains some 180,000 fragments of papyrus bearing witness not only to the ways in which this technology was used in ancient Egypt but also to the ways in which it reflected political and cultural changes.

The collection was originally formed by a private collector, Austrian Grand Duke Rainer at the end of the 19th century, an enthusiast who employed local agents to collect papyrus on his behalf in Cairo and later bequeathed his collection to the Austrian state. His collection makes up the core of the Papyrus Museum today, selected items from which are on show in the institution’s Hofburg galleries.

The papyrus fragments are divided into thematic areas, with helpful commentary signaling their importance. One area given special focus contains fragments of texts from ancient Greek, ancient Egyptian, and ancient Latin literature.

At least since the conquest of the country by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE and the subsequent installation of the Greek-speaking Ptolemaic Dynasty, ancient Egypt was a country of multiple languages, with Greek being used for government and administration, and ancient Egyptian for other matters among the country’s still largely ancient Egyptian-speaking population. Latin was used in education and to a certain extent also in administration, notably after Egypt’s absorption into the Roman Empire following the defeat of the Roman general Antony and the Egyptian queen Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE.

The Papyrus Museum includes examples of ancient Greek literary texts written on papyrus fragments, including from the ancient Greek historian Xenophon’s book Hellenica and from the epic poem the Iliad by Homer. As is so often the case with similar papyrus fragments, recycled for other purposes such as for wrapping ancient Egyptian mummies or simply discarded as waste to be dug up by archaeologists thousands of years later, these fragments were often used and reused in different contexts. The fragment containing extracts from Homer’s poem has also been used for what appear to be mathematics exercises, for example, leading its discoverers to think it may have been used in education.

Another fragment, this time containing lines from one of the 1st-century BCE Roman politician Cicero’s speeches against the rebel senator Catiline, has been translated into Greek on the same piece of papyrus, underlining ancient Egypt’s multilingualism, particularly among the country’s elite Greek and Latin-speaking communities.

Other fragments are more workaday or practical and include texts referring to loans, bills, tax payments, business deals, and various kinds of legal agreements, all of which provide a unique picture of how such things were handled in chiefly (because of the dates of the fragments that have survived) Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt.

There are papyrus fragments referring to the lease of vineyards, the payment of debts, and contracts between buyers and sellers. Most of these are in Greek, presumably often written by a professional scribe or lawyer, though sometimes they are also in ancient Egyptian demotic, possibly suggesting a less formal type of agreement.

One item, from the 3rd century BCE and written in Greek, is a declaration of numbers of livestock and slaves, according to the exhibition produced in the wake of an edict issued by the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy II Philadelphus to the effect that all such assets must be declared for tax purposes. Though included in the section on agriculture and trade in the exhibition, such documents, the presentation says, make up a fair proportion of the total collection.

The ancient Egyptian state, at least in its Ptolemaic and Roman versions, could be heavily bureaucratic, and so in addition to papyrus fragments registering births and deaths, all in Greek as befitting administrative documents, there are many others responding to various demands by the authorities. There is a census declaration in Greek – the exhibition says the Ptolemaic state wanted these every 14 years for tax purposes – and tax declarations regarding payments in response to the poll tax, the salt tax, the beer tax, and the wheat tax – the tax regime seems to have been wide-ranging but notably regressive – all in Greek and dating from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt.

There are also private documents that give insight into how ordinary ancient Egyptians of the time lived. These include letters of reconciliation, condolence, and a letter from a son to a father from the 4th century CE predictably asking for an additional allowance. There are marriage contracts and engagement agreements, usually setting out the dowry and financial arrangements, and there are wills and litigations over inheritance.

One particularly interesting document, analysed in detail, is a loan agreement between two Roman soldiers dated to Alexandria on 27 August 27 CE. One soldier – they are both auxiliaries in one of the two Roman legions then based in Alexandria – agrees with the other to loan him 200 Ptolemaic drachmas, in addition to an existing debt of 400 drachmas. As the commentary to this document explains, at the one-to-one exchange rate of the drachma to the Roman sestertius in place at the time, this would mean the not inconsiderable sum of 60 per cent of the debtor’s annual salary of 1,050 sestertii.

The agreement is written in Greek, with a note to the effect that it has been written for the two soldiers, “as they cannot write.” There is another note in Latin at the bottom signaling the receipt of the money “in the 13th year of the Emperor Tiberius Augustus.”

“Young men from Egypt’s Greek-speaking families joined the Roman army for the sake of a secure income, social prestige, career possibilities, and ultimately the grant of Roman citizenship on discharge,” the exhibition says.

 

Papyrus in Arabic: In 695 CE, Arabic replaced Greek as the language of government and administration in Egypt following the Arab invasion in 639-642 CE. Papyrus documents in Greek and Latin slowly disappeared, to be replaced by administrative and other documents in Arabic.

The exhibition includes a wide range of these, arranged in similar categories of administrative, private, and other pieces. They include requisitions of food for the Arab armies, among them a receipt signed by Arab general Abdallah bin Jabir in Greek and Arabic for 65 sheep and dated 25 April 643 CE. This is described as the earlier such bilingual Arabic-Greek document ever found in Egypt.

Sometimes the Arab authorities seem to have found it easier to communicate with the Egyptian population in demotic Egyptian, now called Coptic, as in an 8th-century CE labour demand signed by Rashid bin Halid but written in Coptic. More often, though, Arabic alone was used, as in an 8th-century letter from the Arab governor Qurra bin Sharik on tax matters. There are also a few private letters in Arabic, as that language replaced Greek and Coptic in the wider population, one being over child custody and dating to the 10th century and the other being from a “deceived wife” to her husband dating from the 12th.

While political regimes and the languages that went with them may have come and gone over the immensely long course of ancient Egyptian history, visitors may well come away from the Papyrus Museum’s exceptionally interesting presentation of documents from its collection thinking that certain issues are perennial, among them debt, tax, and other financial and also sometimes military obligations.

 

Papyrus Museum of the Austrian National Library, New Hofburg Palace, Vienna.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 12 September, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly