The rediscovery of the Louvre papyri

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

Since its creation, the Musée du Louvre has built up an extensive collection of Egyptian papyri. This exceptional heritage includes fragments dating from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Many of them have never been studied in depth. Today, researchers are endeavoring to show what these fragile media tell us about their era.
Meet Carl-Loris ^Raschel*, papyrologist at the Collège de France.

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 on 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 engraving ", explains Carl-Loris Raschel. These different types of support testify to the diversity of uses of writing in Egypt over the centuries. Contrary to popular belief, hieroglyphic papyri are very rare." On Egyptian papyri, we find mostly Demotic, the everyday Egyptian script, but also Greek, Coptic and even Arabic ", he continues. The variety of papyri on display 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. Yet piecing together these stories is sometimes a challenge, as the scattering of the pieces into many different fragments can lead to confusion.

An eventful history

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 further developed through purchases from papyrus merchants. Some of the practices of the time, such as the purchase of heterogeneous lots or errors in the grouping of fragments, pose challenges for researchers today." Papyrus dealers of the time were not necessarily very particular. Many of them were more like smugglers engaging in illegal excavations ", recalls the papyrologist, underlining the uncertainties surrounding the exact provenance of many texts.
The Second World War also complicated the task of curators. The dispersal and hasty storage of collections following the German invasion led to a certain amount of archival chaos." There is a sort of double inventory, with old and new call numbers that we can't always match up ", confides the researcher. Restoring a coherent order to this corpus is an essential step in making it accessible to specialists the world over.

Building a scientific community

Giving a second life to little-known documents is not limited to archiving. For Carl-Loris Raschel, it also means making the texts available in recent scientific editions, starting with some very fine papyri from the Byzantine period." These new editions, based on modern papyrus digitization technologies, make it possible to correct misinterpretations, contextualize and make the pieces available for consultation online ", he mentions. Widespread distribution of the papyri would pave the way for renewed study of these texts, uniting researchers around an ambitious project that reflects the challenge of rediscovering a thousand-year-old heritage.

The creation of a papyrology center at the Musée du Louvre would centralize the study of documents scattered throughout the museum's various departments." This papyrology center would encourage collaboration between researchers currently scattered across the various departments of the Musée du Louvre ", observes the papyrologist. This initiative, still under study, embodies a desire to enhance the value of a papyrus collection which, far from being static, continues to evolve in step with new discoveries and interpretations. For the researcher, each fragment, even the most modest, has the potential to reveal new knowledge about Egypt's ancient civilizations. By cross-referencing different papyrus databases around the world, certain fragments can resonate with others. Sometimes, researchers are able to reconstruct the biographies of ancient Egyptian inhabitants, or even families." By rediscovering the papyri in the Louvre, we are bringing people back to life several millennia after their disappearance ! ", he exclaims. Thanks to the collaboration of researchers from all over the world, the Louvre's papyrus collection is still revealing its secrets.

*Carl-Loris Raschel is a researcherat the Written Culture in Late Antiquity and Byzantine Papyrologychairheld by Prof. Jean-Luc Fournet. He has a postdoctoral contract under a partnership agreement between the Collège de France and the Musée du Louvre.