Remarks of Donald Mastronarde, Director of the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri, at the ceremonial opening of Hearst Tebtunis papyri delivered to Berkeley after 105 years (October 18, 2005)

In 1899, as part of her many efforts to promote the University of California to a new level of comprehensiveness and distinction, Phoebe Apperson Hearst began commissioning the purchase of objects and artefacts to enrich its library and its teaching collections. To provide material from Egypt to represent Egyptian and Greco-Roman civilization, she engaged the German scholar George Reisner as her agent. Through him she arranged to finance the 1899-1900 season of excavation at Umm-el-Breigat, the site of the ancient Fayum town of Tebtunis. The excavators were Grenfell and Hunt, two Oxford scholars who devoted themselves to seeking to recover papyri from a series of sites. In accordance with the agreement with Mrs. Hearst, the Oxford scholars recovered papyri and took them back to Oxford for preliminary study. Grenfell and Hunt were to publish a selection of the papyri and then forward the whole collection to Berkeley. At the same time, up until 1905, Reisner obtained artefacts on behalf of Mrs. Hearst, also intended to be transferred to the University of California.

The plans did not work out quite as expected. In 1924, the date of a faculty report on the matter, the University had not yet received any of the papyri or artefacts. Because of the illness and death of the original editors, publication of the selected papyri was delayed for a long time, although the first two volumes had actually appeared very rapidly. Reisner ended his employment with Mrs. Hearst in 1905, became an employee of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and was not forthcoming in his communications with the University. The Hearst purchases from Egypt were then in at least two locations: the Tebtunis papyri were in Oxford, under the auspices of the Egypt Exploration Society, and were clearly understood to be there temporarily on the way to an eventual home in Berkeley; the artefacts, the Hearst Medical Papyrus, and four fascinating rolls of early Middle Kingdom documents were in Europe or Boston under the control of Reisner.

Most of the Tebtunis papyri were shipped from Oxford to Berkeley in the 1930s, and another box owed to Berkeley was discovered in London in the 1950s and forwarded as well. For about fifty years everyone assumed this was the entire collection, but that assumption was assisted by the scant attention that the collection received during most of that time. The mid 1990s brought important changes. The Advanced Papyrological Information System, spearheaded by Roger Bagnall of Columbia University (who happend to be present today as Visiting Sather Professor of Classical Literature), devoted some of its resources from funding awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to the conservation and study of the Berkeley collection. The Department of Classics, of which I was then chair, took a new interest in the collection and with the prompting of my colleague Mark Griffith we invited papyrologist Ann Hanson to spend a semester as visiting professor to teach courses and to advise us about the potential of the collection. Professor Hanson noted the presence of inventory numbers beginning with capital T (the T-numbers) on many pieces that she used in her seminar and she asked her students to pay attention to these in the hope that the numbers could provide some help toward relating different fragments to each other. In 1999, the Department of Classics declared in its academic plan its intention of hiring a papyrologist in the near future, and I led a committee of interested faculty in entering a proposal to create the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri in the campus competition for new research centers announced by Chancellor Berdahl. With the strong support of The Bancroft Library, of then Dean of Arts and Humanities Ralph Hexter, and of then Vice Chancellor for Research Joseph Cerny, our proposal overcame the scepticism of many members of the review committee and earned seed funding for up to ten years. The Center was established in 2000, and its first business was to recruit a papyrologist. We were very fortunate to hire Dr. Todd Hickey, who in less than 4 and a half years has put the Center and the collection on the map of world papyrology and has overseen remarkable progress in cataloguing, conservation, and digitization.

In Todd Hickey's seminars, he too asked his students to pay attention to T-numbers, but the result was initially puzzling. Students who hunted for T-numbers adjacent to those of the pieces they were studying frequently found that there were no such numbers to be found in the collection. Todd then set one of our best graduate student researchers, Kenneth Jones, the task of compiling a complete list of which T-numbers were here and which numbers were missing. As with most of our graduate student researchers, Ken's employment was the result of the generous financial support of Mr. A. Richard Diebold and the Salus Mundi Foundation. At about the same time, an article was published that coincidentally revealed that there were papyri from Tebtunis with T-numbers in Oxford, along with an unconvincing conjecture as to the meaning of these numbers. Thanks to the research conducted here, Todd could determine that Grenfell and Hunt numbered important pieces sequentially with T-numbers on each day of the excavation as they took their first look at the finds of the day. The obvious conclusion was that, for example, a papyrus with the number T-201 in Oxford was excavated between T-197 and T-205, both of which are in Berkeley: that is, the Oxford papyri with T-numbers are from the 1899-1900 excavation and are part of the Hearst material promised to the University.

Thanks to the evidence assembled by Todd Hickey and Kenneth Jones and also to the assumption of leadership of the Oxford archive by Professor Alan Bowman in late 2003, we were able to obtain the agreement not only of the Oxford papyrologists but also of the Egypt Exploration Society that three tins of papyri in the Oxford archives were indeed the property of the University of California. After various formalities, completed with the able assistance of Anthony Payne of BernardQuaritch Ltd. of London, the papyri were received in August, just at the moment the whole collection was being moved to the temporary quarters of The Bancroft during the seismic renovation of its campus building. The relocated Bancroft opened to the public yesterday, and we are pleased to have the official opening of the new papyri today.

The current monetary value of these pieces cannot be calculated, but the scholarly value is immense. Our collection, already remarkable for its size and its provenance from a single location, is now enriched with more related pieces that will offer important additional data to the scholars and students from several nations who are intensively engaged in research and publication. Todd Hickey will speak to this in a moment.

For now, I wish to formally thank the Egypt Exploration Society and Professor Bowman for their integrity and their cooperation in the transfer of the papyri to Berkeley. Heartfelt thanks are also due to the financial backers of the new Center, including the central seed funding through the Vice Chancellor for Research Office and the annual gifts of Richard Diebold. The support of the Library administration, especially University Librarian Thomas Leonard, Bancroft Director Charles Faulhaber, and Rare Books Librarian Anthony Bliss, has also been crucial to our success.

Before I end my remarks, I cannot refrain from noting that there is still unfinished business regarding Phoebe Hearst's Egyptian purchases for the University. The Hearst Medical Papyrus did arrive in Berkeley in 1928, and many artefacts came to the Museum of Anthropology, but through a lack of transparency and lack of cooperation on the part of George Reisner and some of his successors at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, we still do not have Reisner's documentary records, the records that would provide scholars with essential data for the effective study of those artefacts. Furthermore, the four Middle Kingdom papyrus rolls are even now retained in Boston, having been published under the name Papyrus Reisner in 1963 and the following years, although the title page of the publication declares that the papyri were purchased by Mrs. Hearst for the University of California. [clarification below] We hope that the good example set by Oxford in the delivery of Mrs. Hearst's Tebtunis papyri may have some effect in persuading others to show a similar sense of cooperation.

Now I turn the podium over to Todd Hickey, to say something about the research potential of the new pieces.

Remarks of Todd Hickey, Assistant Research Papyrologist and Curator of Papyri for the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri and The Bancroft Library

Thank you, Donald. Good afternoon, everyone. My charge today is to attempt to answer the question, "Why all the fuss?" To try to tell you why this box up here and the two others that we've had to leave back at The Bancroft Library are important, why they merit this special attention. It occurs to me that there are several ways in which I can set about this task. For example, I might emphasize the rarity of the material that has just been returned. No matter how much money you have, you couldn't just walk into a rare books dealer somewhere and purchase papyri comparable to those inside these boxes. Papyri of this quality simply aren't available in this quantity—legally, anyway—and this will remain the case as long as institutions with large collections continue to honor their stewardship obligations.

Value, of course, often follows scarcity. We don't talk about monetary values at The Bancroft, and I'm not going to do so today. But I will speak about scholarly value, about material that will have a great impact on both researchers and students—not only here at Berkeley, but around the world. Though I have only been able to examine the new papyri in the most cursory fashion—and have spent mere minutes inside the boxes themselves—I can make this statement without equivocation. Already some weeks ago I was able to contact a colleague in Florence to let her know that we now have another fragment of the Greek medical handbook that she has published; while this past Friday, I alerted a graduate student to a papyrus that will enhance his dissertation on Egyptian religious associations; the papyrus in question contains a list of rules for one such association. For my own research on the social and cultural history of a family of Egyptian priests—a family that I can follow over an unheard-of eight generations—the box before us has given over 30 papyri—increasing the number of texts available for my project by 50%.

These texts that I have just mentioned were not entirely unexpected—some of them, in fact, filled known holes in the collection—but there is also material that came as a complete surprise—most stunningly, the portion of the so-called Tebtunis temple library that has been revealed. These are hieroglyphic and demotic texts from the only Egyptian temple library from which we possess substantial remains. They are interesting in their own right—that is, as witnesses to late Egyptian literature and religion—and even more fascinating when one contextualizes them. Their presence also enhances the prospects for collaborative research with the other institutions that possess material from the Tebtunis library, such as the University of Copenhagen.

Most of the new material, in fact, falls into the surprise category, at least for now. Often you really don't know what you have until you give a text your time, until you have begun the difficult process of reading in earnest. Over the weekend I randomly selected a non-descript fragment from the grainy archival images that Oxford sent to the Library. An hour or two later, I ended up with an example of one of the most disturbing document types in the papyrological corpus, a sale of a slave—a woman, 32 years old, dark-skinned, unblemished—so reads the papyrus—sold to a new owner, probably dislocated from those to dear to her, over 1,900 years ago. To my mind, this woman's story merits our attention and interest as much as any of the texts that I have mentioned, as much as any papyrus that we might pull from these boxes.

Before we get to the opening itself, I would like to make special note of two people: my former graduate student researcher Ken Jones, who, without complaint, did the tedious inventory work that was essential in establishing the case for ownership; and Alan Bowman, the Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, who was truly the difference-maker—without his intervention on our behalf, the papyri simply wouldn't be here in Berkeley.

And now, without further ado, it is my great pleasure to introduce Anthony Bliss—the curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at Bancroft and an advocate for the papyri for many years—who will be opening tin 79 of the Tebtunis Papyri, almost a century after our great benefactress Phoebe Apperson Hearst intended it to be here.