Studying the papyri in the Louvre

Every two weeks, a current scientific topic is explored by a researcher from the Collège de France.

Shortly after its creation, the Musée du Louvre set about building up a major collection of Egyptian papyri. This exceptional heritage includes pieces dating from Pharaonic Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Many have never been seen before. Today, the researchers who study them are keen to show what these fragile media tell us about their era.
Interview with Carl-Loris ^Raschel*, papyrologist at the Collège de France and the Musée du Louvre

While most people think of papyrus as a type of ancient paper made from the plant of the same name, papyrologists are far from working solely with this medium."  In papyrology, we work not only on papyrus paper, but also on ostraca, i.e. fragments of ceramic or stone, or wooden tablets, all media on which people wrote with ink, rather than by engraving ", explains Carl-Loris Raschel. These different types of support bear witness to the diversity of uses of writing in Egypt over the centuries. Contrary to popular belief, hieroglyphic papyri are very rare." On papyrus, we find various Egyptian scripts derived from hieroglyphics, notably hieratic and demotic, but even more from Greek, as well as Coptic and Arabic ", he continues. The variety of papyri reflects the evolution of languages in Egyptian society over a wide historical period.

Indeed, the texts preserved in the Louvre cover a vast period." The whole of antiquity is represented, from Pharaonic texts to early medieval Arabic texts ", explains the researcher. Each fragment tells a story : contracts, administrative accounts, private correspondence or religious documents. This diversity provides a striking insight into the social, economic and cultural interactions of the past. And yet, piecing together these stories is sometimes a challenge, as the scattering of the pieces into many different fragments can lead to confusion.

The long history of a collection

Although the Louvre's collection is ancient, not all papyri are published." We're talking about thousands of texts, some of which are almost confetti with a few letters ", explains Carl-Loris Raschel, referring to the difficulties of reconstructing the meaning of writings caught up in the tumult of history.

The Louvre's papyrus collection dates back to the early ^19th century, in the wake of Bonaparte's Egyptian expedition, and was continued by purchases from merchants. Some of the practices of the time, such as the purchase of heterogeneous lots or the mistaken grouping of fragments, are now among the challenges of research. Fragments of the same papyrus may have been purchased by different collectors or institutions : in the Byzantine corpus on which Carl-Loris Raschel is working, for example, some fragments are linked to fragments from Vienna or Berlin.

The Second World War also complicated the task of curators. The dispersal and hasty storage of collections at the time of the German invasion disrupted the order of the collections and led to the creation of " a double inventory with old and new ratings that we don't always manage to match ", explains the researcher.

Bringing order to this corpus is an essential step in making it accessible to specialists the world over.

Developing scientific cooperation for the benefit of the collection

Work on these sometimes little-known documents is not limited to archiving. They also need to be made available in editions that meet current standards, as the papyrologist is working to do for two very fine papyri from the Byzantine period." These new editions, based on modern papyrus digitization technologies, aim to correct any reading errors, contextualize the information given by the texts and, by making them available online, make them easy to consult ", he mentions. The wider dissemination of papyri would enable their study to be renewed and texts to be reconstructed, uniting researchers around ambitious projects that reflect the challenge of rediscovering a thousand-year-old heritage.

The creation of a papyrology center at the Musée du Louvre would centralize the conservation and study of documents currently divided between three departments." This papyrology center would increase collaboration between researchers belonging to the various departments of the Louvre ", observes the papyrologist. Still under study, this initiative embodies a desire to enhance the value of a papyrus collection which, far from being static, continues to evolve in line with new discoveries and interpretations. Indeed, each fragment, even the most modest, has the potential to reveal new facets of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian civilizations and cultures. By cross-referencing papyrus databases from all over the world, these fragments are reassembled and allowed to resonate with one another. In this way, by tracing the common origin of several scattered texts, researchers are able to reconstruct the lives of ancient Egyptians, and even entire families, as well as their relationships with the rest of society and the authorities." By studying the papyri in the Louvre, we are bringing people back to life several millennia after their disappearance ! " he exclaims. Thanks to the Museum's researchers, and the collaboration of scholars from all over the world, the Louvre's papyrus collection continues to enrich our knowledge.

*Carl-Loris Raschel is a researcher at Pr Jean-Luc Fournet's Written Culture in Late Antiquity and Byzantine Papyrology Chair.He has a postdoctoral contract under a partnership agreement between the Collège de France and the Musée du Louvre.