This papyrus is one of hundreds discovered on Egypt’s Elephantine Island that provide insight into a community of people originally from Judah, once the southern part of the biblical Kingdom of Israel, who lived there in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. The document provides evidence of the community’s efforts to reconstruct their temple.
AS THE NILE FLOWS NORTH out of Sudan into Upper, or southern, Egypt, it passes a small island that was a crossroads of exchange between Africa and the Middle East for thousands of years. Such great quantities of ivory were traded on the island that the ancient Egyptians called it Yeb, which means elephant. This legacy is the source of the name the Greeks gave it in the late fourth century B.C.—Elephantine. The island, which measures just a mile long and 1,300 feet across at its widest point, served a key role in Egypt’s defense throughout its history and was home to border fortresses that monitored traffc on the river. By the late nineteenth century, when the British occupied Egypt, Elephantine had begun to attract European tourists and British offcials involved in building the Aswan Low Dam. Archaeologists were aware of the island, but at a time when many were more interested in pursuing treasure than scientific knowledge, it received less attention than Luxor, Thebes, and other sites where dozens of tombs and temples were uncovered.
Farmers in the southern part of Elephantine, however, often dug into mounds containing ruined ancient houses to extract soil to use as fertilizer. In the 1890s, they began to come across bundles of papyrus documents, which they sold on the burgeoning antiquities market. Archaeologists, explorers, and collectors immediately understood that the fragmentary texts were extremely unusual. They were written in Aramaic, a widely used Semitic language, and contained biblical names such as Hosea and Menahem, indicating they might be connected to the Torah, or the