Editing Elephantine papyri and ostraca (section)

{{Short description|5th- to 4th-century BCE Egyptian texts}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=November 2024}}
[[File:Papyrus narrating the story of the wise chancellor Ahiqar. Aramaic script. 5th century BCE. From Elephantine, Egypt. Neues Museum.jpg|thumb|260px|Papyrus narrating the story of the wise chancellor Ahiqar. Aramaic script. 5th century BCE. From Elephantine, Egypt. Neues Museum, Berlin]]
The '''Elephantine Papyri and Ostraca''' consist of thousands of documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of [[Elephantine]] and [[Aswan]], which yielded hundreds of [[Papyrus|papyri]] and [[ostracon|ostraca]] in [[hieratic]] and [[Demotic (Egyptian)|demotic]] [[Egyptian language|Egyptian]], [[Aramaic language|Aramaic]], [[Koine Greek]], [[Latin]] and [[Coptic language|Coptic]], spanning a period of 100 years in the 5th to 4th centuries BCE. The documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives and are thus an invaluable source of knowledge for scholars of varied disciplines such as [[epistolography]], law, society, religion, language, and [[onomastics]]. The Elephantine documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives: divorce documents, the [[manumission]] of enslaved people, and other business. The dry soil of [[Upper Egypt]] preserved the documents.

Hundreds of these Elephantine papyri span 100 years, during the 5th to 4th centuries BCE. Legal documents and a cache of letters survived, turned up on the local "[[grey market]]" of antiquities starting in the late 19th century, and were scattered into several Western collections.

A number of the Aramaic papyri document the Jewish community among soldiers stationed at Elephantine under [[Achaemenid Empire|Achaemenid]] rule, 495–399 BCE. The so-called "Passover Letter" of 419 BCE (discovered in 1907), which appears to give instructions for the observance of the Festival of Unleavened Bread (though [[Passover]] itself is not mentioned in the extant text), is in the [[Egyptian Museum of Berlin]].

The standard reference collection of the Aramaic documents from Elephantine is the ''[[Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt]]''.<ref name=Cook>{{cite book | last=Cook | first=Edward | title=Biblical Aramaic and Related Dialects: An Introduction | publisher=Cambridge University Press | year=2022 | isbn=978-1-108-78788-8 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=kdCIEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA6 | ref=none | page=3-7|quote=Imperial Aramaic (IA) [Footnote: Other names: Official Aramaic, Reichsaramäisch. Because many of the surviving texts come from Egypt, some scholars speak of "Egyptian Aramaic.”]… As noted, the documentation of IA is significantly greater than that of Old Aramaic; Egypt's hot and dry climate has been particularly favorable to the preservation of antiquities, including Aramaic texts written on soft media such as papyrus or leather. The primary, although not exclusive, source of our knowledge of Persian-period Aramaic is many papyri discovered on the island of Elephantine… All of the Egyptian Aramaic texts have been collected and re-edited in the Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt… This is now the standard text edition.}}</ref>