Ancient egyptian scrolls12/9/2023 ![]() The Copper Age can be given short shrift in histories as being transitional between the Neolithic Age of stone tools and the advent of bronze. Egypt’s first Dynasties were at the tail end of the Chalcolithic or Copper Age: they had metal, but just copper-they had not learned to make the alloy bronze. And the prose, while for the most part quite academic in content, is clear and readable.Īnd some of these details are extremely interesting. This is significantly mitigated by the great many marvelous photos and illustrations, all well-captioned, that one might expect from Thames & Hudson. What it discusses, it does in considerable technical detail, more perhaps than the non-expert might wish to have. The second drawback is that the book goes pretty deep into the weeds (or maybe rushes) of Egyptology. The bulk of the book, however, provides context: the history, nature and construction of the pyramids, Egyptian trade, the archaeology of the Red Sea Coast, with chapters ranging from “The Quest for Copper” to “How the Pyramids Created a Unified State”. The papyri, for example, link Merer’s group to Ankh-Haf, Director of the Port of Khufu, a senior official known from other references and of whom there is a striking bust. ![]() What they provide is (admittedly important) information about how work 4700 years ago was organized, interesting and even touching details about the people (some of whom are named) and their daily lives. They are themselves, in the broader sweep of early Egyptian history, relatively minor items. The problem is the papyri do not, and perhaps could not, carry an entire book. Nor is the subtitle “How Ancient Papyri Reveal the Secrets of the Pyramids” terribly accurate either: instead, these discoveries provide a catalyst and organizing principle for a deep dive into what is now known about the Pyramids and their construction. This is something of a bait-and-switch because only a relatively small part of the book deals directly with the scrolls and their contents. “The Red Sea Scrolls” is, of course, meant to evoke (and even rhymes with) the more famous and extensive “Dead Sea Scrolls” from Qumran. The most glaring (although perhaps also the most irrelevant) is the book’s title. The Red Sea Scrolls: How Ancient Papyri Reveal the Secrets of the Pyramids, Mark Lehner, Pierre Tallet (Thames & Hudson, January 2011)īefore one can discuss the book’s virtues, one needs to point out a couple of drawbacks, from which, to a large extent, the book’s strengths in fact stem. These are not inscriptions of kings or princes or religious invocations, but working documents written by real people in real time about real-life activities. The papyri themselves are evidence of the state of Egyptian bureaucracy (standardized and omnipresent) as well as a direct contact to relatively humble members of Egyptian society. They spend part of the year ferrying stone on the Nile, before moving to the port, where the papyri (which traveled with the group) were, for some reason, left behind. The main narrative in these papyri spell out in some detail, as one chapter goes, a year in the life of Merer and his men. ![]() These fragments appear to be the “oldest written documents” ever found (document meaning material approximating paper as opposed to some other material) more interesting perhaps is that they are from logbooks-tasks, travel, supplies, rations-of an official called Inspector Merer, who ran a work gang who also transported stone blocks destined for the Great Pyramid. ![]() Nearly a decade ago, archaeologists at Wadi al-Jarf on Egypt’s Red Sea Coast found a cache of papyrus fragments dating from the reign of the 4th Dynasty King Khufu (Cheops), he of the Great Pyramid at Giza, dating from 2633-2605 BCE.
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