On-line Exhibits

When the UC Berkeley share of the Tebtunis excavations reached the campus, the texts on papyri and objects were separated. The texts were housed in what would later become The Bancroft Library and the objects were housed in what is now the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Although the physical distance between their buildings is short, their institutional identities have resulted in varying policies concerning matters like preservation and access.  CTP's on-line exhibits are an effort to bridge an artificial divide, to reunite objects with texts in a virtual environment.

Readers and Writers in Roman Tebtunis was adapted from an exhibit curated by Elisabeth R. O'Connell to coincide with Ann Ellis Hanson's 2005 public lecture, Tebtunis: Its Inhabitants and its Papyri of Medical Content. Based on literary and documentary texts in Berkeley's Tebtunis collection, the exhibit investigates the evidence (and limits of the evidence) for literacy in Roman Egypt.

Ethnic Identity in Graeco-Roman Egypt was adapted from an exhibit curated by Elisabeth R. O'Connell to coincide with Willy Clarysse's public lecture, The Great Revolt of the Egyptians (205-186 BE). The exhibit explores the definitional bases that distinguish the "Greek," "Roman" and "Egyptian" implicit in "Graeco-Roman Egypt" through the lens of archaeological (including papyrological) evidence in Berkeley's collections.

Religion, Magic and Medicine in Ptolemaic and Roman Tebtunis was adapted from an exhibit curated by Elisabeth R. O'Connell to coincide with Dominic Rathbone's 2003 public lecture, A Town Full of Gods: Imagining Religious Experience at Tebtunis. The exhibit takes Tebtunis as a case study of how religion functioned in Graeco-Roman Egypt and challenges the idea that "religion, magic and medicine" constituted discrete categories in antiquity.

ConTexts: Graeco-Roman Egypt was adapted by Elisabeth R. O'Connell (using text from Ancient Lives) to coincide with Dorothy Thompson's 2002 public lecture, Obelisks and Fountains: Greek Culture in Hellenistic Egypt. The exhibit provides a short introduction to the history of the collection and the value of its contents.

Ancient Lives: The Tebtunis Papyri in Context was adapted by William Short from Bancroft's major 2000 show curated by Anthony Bliss to celebrate the collection's centennial. This exhibit coincided with The Tebtunis Papyri: The First 100 Years, a symposium sponsored by the Bancroft Library and the Department of Classics on September 24 and 25, 1999.  An international group of scholars discussed social and administrative history, cultural exchange, and religion as illuminated by the material from Tebtunis.  The texts of many of their presentations are available in the symposium portion of the exhibit.