Remarks of Todd Hickey, Assistant Research Papyrologist and Curator of Papyri for the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri and The Bancroft Library, at the presentation of the Hearst papyri delivered to Berkeley after 104 years (November 1, 2006)

Good afternoon. My name is Todd Hickey, and I am the Bancroft Library's assistant research papyrologist and an assistant professor in the Department of Classics. Back in July 2001, during my first week on the job at Bancroft, while I was sifting through the new Tebtunis Center's archives in an effort to learn more about the 25,000 papyri for which I had just been given responsibility, a letter signed with a familiar name—Klaus Baer—caught my eye. Baer was a distinguished Egyptology professor. I myself associated him with the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, where I had worked and studied as a graduate student, but at the time of the letter's writing, in July 1963, he was a member of the Berkeley faculty. Baer's letter, which he had sent to William Fretter, then the Dean of Letters and Science, concerned four rolls of hieratic papyri, the so-called Reisner papyri, that the Hearst Egyptian Expedition had excavated for the University at the very beginning of the twentieth century. Baer was informing Fretter that these manuscripts had never made it to Berkeley, and I knew—sitting there in my cubicle almost forty years later—that these papyri were generally considered to be part of the Egyptian collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

Thus began the sequence of events—research, discovery, and negotiation; at one point, there was even an anonymous informant—that has led us here today. Professor Mastronarde, who was essential to the successful conclusion of these matters, will be elaborating on them in a few moments; for my part, I merely wish to express how satisfying this day is for the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri. Phoebe Apperson Hearst bestowed upon this University the finest collection of Egyptian manuscripts this side of the Atlantic; west of Oxford, they are unsurpassed in quality, quantity, and chronological range—they present us, to borrow an expression from Henry James, with "whiffs and glimpses" of Egyptian society and culture over an unprecedented 3,000 years. With the recovery that we are marking today, and with the return of 2,000 Tebtunis papyri from Oxford last October, faculty and students at the University of the California and beyond are much closer to enjoying the full measure of Mrs. Hearst's remarkable generosity. That the Tebtunis Center—in its youth, a mere six years after its foundation—has been able to bring these complicated matters to such favorable resolutions is a source of great pride for us.

Remarks of Donald Mastronarde, Director of the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri

The images that accompanied these remarks may also be seen online: click here.

Phoebe Apperson Hearst, one of the greatest donors in the early history of the University, supported many efforts to promote the University of California to a new level of comprehensiveness and distinction. By commissioning the purchase of objects and artefacts, she intended to enrich the libraries and museum collections in order to provide faculty and students with a precious resource for their teaching and research. The agent for Mrs. Hearst's acquisitions from Egypt was the American archaeologist George Andrew Reisner. In addition to arranging for the Tebtunis excavations of 1899-1900 by the Oxford scholars Grenfell and Hunt, Reisner planned and executed in 1901-1904 a four-year program of excavations called the Hearst Egyptian Expedition. Most of his activity at this time was at Naga ed Deir, a necropolis in Upper Egypt.

The expedition recovered a number of fragments of ancient writing, dating from before 2000 BCE to late antiquity. Among these, the most famous find consisted of four rolls of accounts in hieratic script, now called the Reisner Papyri I-IV. The rolls were found in a tomb, lying on a stone coffin, much worm-eaten, but still looking like papyrus rolls. NES graduate student Karin Kroenke, who has been studying photos and records of the dig and is here today, has established that the tomb was N.410, not N.408 as reported in publications, an error arising from mislabeling of expedition photos.

At intervals, Reisner reached an agreement with Egyptian officials about which excavated items from the Expedition would stay in Egypt at the Cairo Museum and which were released for eventual shipment to California. Reisner himself had the right of publication of the finds, and thus legitimately retained them first in his storehouse in Egypt. In 1904, with the collapse of the silver boom, Mrs. Hearst was unable to renew her support for Reisner's efforts in Egypt. He, however, had already been discussing the possibility of continuing with other sponsors, and from 1905 until his death in 1942 he continued to spend most of his time in Egypt conducting excavations for Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which was competing with the Metropolitan Museum in New York in the acquisition of impressive Egyptian material for permanent exhibition.

Upon Mrs. Hearst's death in 1919, none of the material acquired through or excavated by George Reisner for UC had reached California. In December 1924 a faculty committee reported to UC President Campbell about the missing items. Apparently in response to inquiries, the Hearst Medical Papyrus, conserved and mounted, was soon delivered to Berkeley, and Reisner soon entrusted the four Middle Kingdom rolls to the famed Berlin papyrus conservator Hugo Ibscher. A separate inquiry made to Oxford eventually resulted in a major shipment of the Tebtunis papyri to Berkeley in the 1930s.

Hugo Ibscher was notoriously slow because so many papyri were entrusted to him, but in 1928 he sent the first photographs of what we now call P. Reisner I to George Reisner in Egypt. It was almost ten years, however, before he was ready to send the fully cleaned and mounted pieces of this first roll to America, and the destination of that shipment was Boston. When the impressive material arrived at the Museum of Fine Arts in January 1938, the curator Dows Dunham wrote to Reisner in Egypt to ask what pieces these were and whether they should be accessioned to the Museum. Twelve months later Reisner finally answered this letter, explaining that the papyri were from the Hearst Egyptian Expedition, but that he retained the right of publication, and that he needed to write to UC to find out if they would pay expenses of conservation and shipment. There is no indication that Reisner ever followed through.

In 1939 a young British scholar named Paul Smither began to decipher P. Reisner I from photographs, but he was told in 1940 not to work further until the issue of the ownership of the papyri had been cleared up. The MFA Director was supposed to take a trip to California in spring 1940 and take up the matter in person with authorities there, but if this trip ever took place, there is no evidence of a meeting with UC officials. The remaining rolls were still with Hugo Ibscher in Berlin when World War II broke out, and before the end of the war Smither and Reisner and Hugo Ibscher were all dead. At the time of Ibscher's death, in 1943, the Middle Kingdom pieces were hidden in his house in a suburb of Berlin. A few years after the war, in 1948 or 1949, East German authorities arrived at the Ibscher home to demand the transfer of any remaining papyri in the house to the state. Hugo's son Rolf, also a papyrus conservator, signed a statement declaring that no papyri remained in the house, although the Reisner papyri were in the attic. Soon thereafter Rolf Ibscher enlisted a friend to help him move the papyri to the American Sector and deposit them for safekeeping "in the home of an old lady who owns a small stationery store not far from the R.R. station of Zehlendorf."

As early as 1958 the young Yale Egyptologist W. Kelly Simpson, who had taken an interest in P. Reisner I, the pieces that were already in Boston, began to seek the whereabouts of the other rolls. The crucial breakthrough came in August 1960 when Simpson's Yale colleague Karl J. Pelzer attended an Egyptology congress in Moscow where Rolf Ibscher was also speaking. Pelzer met with Ibscher and they agreed to meet again in Berlin in September. There Pelzer and Ibscher viewed the papyri at the old lady's stationery store, Pelzer paid her 100 Deutschmarks (less than $25) for her safekeeping of them, and they were moved to an apartment belonging to Ibscher's friend, so that Ibscher could cross from East Berlin several times a week to work on cleaning and mounting.

P. Reisner II reached Boston in January 1961, and Simpson was looking forward to publishing these remarkable pieces, which by now had been accessioned, improperly, to the MFA. But in spring 1961 Professor Klaus Baer of Berkeley's Department of Near Eastern Studies began asking about the Naga ed-Deir rolls. In November of that year Baer even spoke to Simpson in person at a conference and was put off with a misleading tale about delicate negotiations to retrieve the papyri from East Germany. When P. Reisner I was published early in 1963, Baer realized that he had been misled and in July 1963 he submitted a report to Dear William Fretter suggesting that UC authorities needed to decide whether and how to pursue their claim of ownership. We are not sure what happened at the administrative level after Baer's letter to Dean Fretter, but a letter from Simpson to the curator in Boston written after the Egyptology conference in November 1963 fills in the picture. At the conference, Baer spoke cordially to Simpson about his recent publication of the first roll, and Baer never brought up the issue of ownership, and it is clear from this letter that Simpson was relieved at this turn of events. Between the time of his July report and this meeting, Baer had decided to accept a position at the University of Chicago, though he had not yet actually moved there.

P. Reisner III and IV reached Boston in 1964. The three remaining volumes of Simpson's publication appeared in 1965, 1969, and 1986. Shortly after the Center was founded, Todd Hickey discovered in the archives Baer's 1963 report, the 1924 report, and Reisner's own letter to Mrs. Hearst telling her of the discovery of the rolls, as well as the contract between Mrs. Hearst and Reisner. One member of the committee, Professor Keller, herself a student of Klaus Baer, knew more of the background. Aa a result, the Advisory Board began discussing the Naga ed-Deir papyri. In 2003 we wrote to the Museum to ask whether they could document their ownership (perhaps, after all, someone at UC had at some point signed away our rights). No substantive response was ever heard. But last spring semester I was residing in the Boston area myself, so I applied for information in person. The new curator, Lawrence Berman, was extremely cooperative. We shared our documentation in order to establish the history more clearly, and when CTP proposed a settlement whereby the papyri would finally come to Berkeley, he supported it and gained the support of other curators and ultimately approval by the Museum trustees.

Although the Reisner Papyri, which should have been known as Hearst Papyri, are the most spectacular pieces in the shipment, there are others, including two large and splendid Demotic Egyptian pieces, from Deir el-Ballas, the necropolis of Dendera, and a piece of parchment with writing in Coptic, which are also here today. I am delighted to have these pieces and others not displayed her today added to the collection. And now much remains to be done to study the unpublished fragments and to provide for the cleaning and remounting of the papyri.

Acknowledgments

Several factors have contributed to this fulfillment of Mrs. Hearst's intention over 100 years after the Hearst Egyptian Expedition: the foundation of the Center and the consequent research conducted by its faculty and student researchers; information gathered by NES graduate student Karin Kroenke for her dissertation and by Joan Knudsen, Registrar of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology; and the cooperation of Curator Larry Berman and MFA Assistant Registrar Siobhan Wheeler. Important financial support of the retrieval of these papyri also deserves to be acknowledged. Partial compensation to the Museum of Fine Arts for past conservation and shipping came from funds provided by an anonymous donor and by the Chair Fund of the Melpomene Professor of Classics. The Main Library assumed the considerable costs of the packing and shipping, we received gratis advice about shipment from Atthowe Fine Art Services, and the UC Office of the President insured the shipment. For today's event we thank CTP Research Specialist Roberta Mazza for preparing scans and the selected papyri, Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian Tony Bliss for his work on the shipping from Boston and for facilitating transport to this room, Damaris Moore of Library Development for organization, UL Tom Leonard and AUL Beth Dupuis for permission to hold the event in this room, and Kathleen Maclay of Public Affairs for publicity. Two pieces happened to be temporarily in New York and we thank also Sarah Boyd of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for prompt (and free) shipment of these to California.