Thousands of years ago, Egyptians used papyrus to write their documents and letters alongside their day-to-day lives. Now, papers people once considered trash are collected and studied by scholars, allowing them to learn about the lives of the people who lived in ways not so different from today.
These papyri now reside in the Harry Ransom Center’s “Lives and Literacy in Ancient Egypt” exhibition, which opened to the public on Saturday and will run through Aug. 2. The collection features documents and artifacts rarely seen by the public, including the world’s earliest fragment of the New Testament and early adaptations of Homer’s “The Odyssey.”
“There’s a lot in the show, but if you have any interest in the past and its relationship to how we live our lives today, there’ll be something for you there,” said Aaron Pratt, Carl and Lily Pforzheimer curator of early books and manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center. “If you want to feel really far away from the past, you can do that, but if you want to feel really close to the past, you’ll also get that as well.”
In collaboration with The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, the exhibition comprises artifacts from the Greco-Roman period (332 BCE–641 CE) mainly collected from mummy cartonnage, a practice similar to papier-mâché that was used to create cases for the dead.
“I like that there’s, on the one hand, things that are very hard for us to relate to, the stuff that draws us as kids to ancient Egypt,” Pratt said. “They mummify people, and at the same time, when you look at the administrative documents, it’s people being people, and people trying to deal with a bureaucracy that’s really challenging to interact with, and that’s really cool.”
The show also includes funerary portraits and steles, pottery and interactive features, such as a puzzle from a manuscript fragment and a touch-and-feel papyrus station.
“There’s an explosion of paperwork that emerges, particularly in the Roman period … and we really are the heirs to Roman bureaucracy, especially here at UT Austin,” religious studies professor Geoffrey Smith said. “We actually benefit from the super abundance of paperwork that was probably very stressful for them.”
From neighborly disputes to marriage poems and a book of the dead, visitors learn the culture, religion, government and day-to-day lives of the Ancient Egyptians.
“What is special about (the exhibition) is, even though it’s many, many years ago that we have these papyri fragments from, we are finding that life isn’t so different from today’s world,” said Ashley Park, head of communications and marketing at the Harry Ransom Center. “There’s lots of drama, there’s lawsuits, there’s insults, there’s gossip. They definitely had a life very similar to what we see here.”
