This new series called Studies on Elephantine (SOE) is based at the Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung (Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection) of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (National Museums Berlin). It is connected to the Egyptian and Oriental Papyrus Collection of the Egyptian Museum. The aim of the series is to give a platform for studies, text editions, and discussions on the cultural history of more than 4000 years located on Elephantine Island in Egypt. Elephantine was a militarily and strategically important island in the river Nile on the southern border of Egypt. No other settlement in Egypt is so well attested through texts over such a long period of time. Its inhabitants formed a multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multi-religious community that left us vast amounts of written sources detailing their everyday lives from the Old Kingdom to beyond the Arab Conquest.
Today, several thousand papyri and other manuscripts from Elephantine are scattered in more than sixty institutions across Europe and beyond. Their texts are written in different languages and scripts, including Hieroglyphs, Hieratic, Demotic, Aramaic, Greek, Coptic and Arabic. The project “Localizing 4000 Years of Cultural History. Texts and Scripts from Elephantine Island in Egypt” is kindly funded by the European Research Council (ERC) with a goal to bring all these texts together, both digitally as an online database and physically as text editions.
The first volume of this new series is dedicated to New Aramaic Papyri from Elephantine in Berlin. More than 800 Aramaic papyri fragments dating to the 5th century BCE in the Berlin Museum have been studied by James D. Moore over the last few years. The results of his studies are presented in this volume, the importance of which cannot be overestimated, as new readings and new insights are now possible into a very important period of the island of Elephantine.
I want to acknowledge, first and foremost, how grateful I am to the members of the Advisory Board who supported the peer-review process of this new series. I am also very appreciative of the financial support that came from the National Museums Berlin, the Thyssen Foundation, and the European Research Council.
I wish to thank Friederike Seyfried, Director of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, and Tzulia Angos, the Elephantine papyrus conservator, without whom this volume would not have been possible. I am also grateful to Sigrid Wollmeiner from the Publication Department of the National Museums in Berlin and Katelyn Chin from Brill Publishing.
May Elephantine be alive again and may this new publication series flourish!
Verena M. Lepper, Berlin