Crocodile and Human Mummies from Tebtynis
Links to the project
20,000 fragments of Hellenistic papyri have been housed in the Bancroft Library on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, since the 1930s. They are inscribed with ancient Greek texts of widely varying content: works of major literature, royal decrees, parts of official or private correspondence, contracts, official reports, tax receipts, and many other documents. Together, they provide valuable insights into everyday life and social conditions - especially those of the large numbers of immigrants who, from the beginning of the Hellenistic period onward, migrated to Egypt from different regions of the Greek world.
All of these written sources originate from the same archaeological site. They were discovered in the winter of 1899/1900 during excavations in the ancient city of Tebtynis (modern Tell Umm el-Baragat in the Fayum), an important cult center of the ancient Egyptian crocodile god Sobek. In pre-Christian times, the fragments had been reused in the production of human and crocodile mummies that were buried in the city’s necropolis.
Crocodile mummy, part of the Egyptian collection of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropologygyptischen Sammlung im Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology (UC Berkeley Library)Crocodile and Human Mummies from Tebtynis
Host Academy
North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts
Location and federal state
Dusseldorf and Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia
Type
Editions: Ancient History
Project number
II.C.32-1/-2
Artificial Intelligence and the Reassembly of Ancient Text Fragments
By employing suitable AI-based methods (so-called fragment matching), the researchers aim to reassemble the many thousands of previously unexplored fragments that emerged when the mummies were dismantled, thereby fully unlocking the immense source value of this Hellenistic papyrus collection. The Academy project seeks to develop new methodological approaches for the analysis and edition of papyrological sources and, in doing so, to expand our knowledge of Hellenistic Egypt.
The researchers are supported in this large-scale editorial project by the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri in Berkeley and the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH). A digital publication platform is planned to make the project’s results accessible to the international papyrological research community.
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