After 100 Years, Ancient Papyri Return to Bancroft Library

Nearly 1,000 pieces of approximately 2,000-year-old Egyptian papyri have finally made their way to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley after being housed at Oxford University for more than 100 years after their discovery at the turn of the century.

The recent addition to Bancroft Library papyri archives will serve as a research resource for scholars in Berkeley and around the world, said Charles Faulhaber, the director of Bancroft Library.

"They're used by people from all over the world," Faulhaber said. "They're used by faculty and students here in the classics and Near Eastern studies at the undergraduate and graduate levels."

The papyri, which come primarily from mummy wrappings in the Egyptian city of Tebtunis, span a period of nearly 600 years when the Egyptian empire was ruled by the Greeks and later the Romans, Faulhaber said.

The trans-cultural nature of the artifacts, which include original text from Homer's Odyssey, will allow researchers to study a cross-section of ancient societies.

The fragments of papyri were originally discovered in 1899 during an expedition funded by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, who sought to enlarge UC Berkeley's relatively new papyri collection. However, upon their discovery, the 1,000 pieces were sent to Oxford to be studied.

It was not until 2000 that, while reading an academic journal, UC Berkeley papyrologist Todd Hickey realized that the university's papyri collection's missing pieces had actually spent the past century at Oxford in the custody of the Egypt Exploration Society, an archaelogical organization.

An appeal process to send the

fragments to UC Berkeley was

immediately set in motion by Donald Mastronarde, director of UC Berkeley's Center for Tebtunis Papyri.

"I wrote a letter presenting the evidence and asked if they would look into their records and check the numbers because we were missing some (pieces)," Mastronarde said.

Since the expedition was paid for by Hearst and was conducted in the name of UC Berkeley, the fragments legally belong to the university, Mastronarde said.

Now, five years after the appeal process began, the papyri have finally made their way back home to the Bancroft Library.

Some of the pieces have yet to be examined at UC Berkeley, while others have already made a significant impact on some research efforts, Mastronarde said.

"Even with just a little bit of study we've been able to connect this collection with ongoing research," he said. "There are also lots of pieces that haven't been looked at yet."

The new set will be added to the 35,000 fragments currently housed at the library, which forms the western hemisphere's largest collection of papyri fragments. However, the University of Michigan claims to own the greatest number of overall lines of papyri writing in the US.

The new items will not be displayed publicly until the Bancroft Library Centennial Exhibition in February 2006, Faulhaber said. Until then, they will be used primarily for research.

"The most important thing about this collection is that it's all from the same location, so it lets us trace the history of that area for 600 years," said Faulhaber. "It provides the kind of information that you simply cannot acquire any other way."

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