Archaeological Context
Ancient Philadelphia and Greek Papyri from Egypt
Basem Gehad has been directing excavations at the Ancient Philadelphia Necropolis in the Egyptian Fayoum since 2016. His team has cleaned tombs that were looted in the late 19th and early 20th century, uncovering information that would otherwise have been lost, documented the extent of the cemetery and how it grew over time, and excavated new tombs with the benefit of modern archaeological methods. The important finds from his excavations include mummy portraits, gabled-roof coffins, traditional Egyptian-style coffins, and almost 30 new papyri in Greek and Demotic (the second to last stage of the Egyptian language).
To learn more about this and other new mummy portraits from Philadelphia,
Ancient Philadelphia was founded in the early Ptolemaic period in the Fayoum (located about a two-hour drive southwest of modern Cairo). The Ptolemies were a dynasty of Macedonian pharaohs who ruled Egypt from the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE) to the death of its last member, the infamous Cleopatra VII (30 BCE). Their rulership style blended Greek and Egyptian customs, and their kingdom governed Egyptians who maintained their culture and Greek immigrants who brought the various traditions of their home cities.
Because of the Greek presence in the last three centuries BCE and the persistence of Greek as a primary language when Egypt became a Roman province after the death of Cleopatra, many papyrus books and everyday documents (such as tax records, marriage contracts, and letters) were written in Greek between 300 BCE and 500 CE. The climate of Egypt, especially the desert, is excellent for preserving the writing material created from the local papyrus plant and thus excavations at Egyptian sites such as Oxyrhynchus and Hermopolis Magna in Middle Egypt, and the various villages of the Fayoum have yielded thousands of ancient Greek books and documents.
Philadelphia was the findspot of the famous Zenon archive, an assembly of papyrus documents associated with Zenon, the agent of Apollonios, a minister to Ptolemy II Philadelphus (ruled 285-246 BCE). From this archive we learn about Zenon’s life as a Greek born in Caria (the south coast of modern Turkey) who traveled throughout the Ptolemaic empire in the course of his work, the construction and administration of Philadelphia, and the running of the estates controlled by Apollonios in Philadelphia, the Fayoum more broadly, and Memphis.
You can learn more about the archive here:
In the Roman period, Philadelphia became the home of Roman veterans, and we learn about their life and business activities from several archives, such as that of Nemesion who collected taxes from 44 to 57 CE.
You can learn more about this archive here:
Painted Mausoleum Structure of the 1st/2nd centuries CE
In both the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, residents of Philadelphia maintained links with major Egyptian cities such as Alexandria and Memphis. For example, in a papyrus that is now housed in Berlin (link to image here ), the weavers’ guild writes to a local official named Dion asking him not to send any more of their members to Alexandria because local production would suffer.
To date, few ancient books have been found at Philadelphia, especially compared to the very large number of documents found in the city and its graveyards. This is probably due to chance, and we should not conclude that residents of the town were not interested in literature. While we hope future discoveries will provide more information on the cultural pursuits of ancient Philadelphians, current research can consider which of the various Roman period residents we know of from the papyri could afford to lay their relatives to rest in grand tombs such as the painted mausoleum structure next to the pit grave where the Euripides papyrus was found.