Papyrus Amherst 63

Amherst 63 was originally a single papyrus scroll with a length of 12 feet (3.7 m), written on both sides.[3] It was created by and for the Jewish diaspora communities in the Egyptian cities of Elephantine and Aswan.[4] The homeland of this community is called rš or ʾrš in the text, which may be identical with the Rashu of Neo-Assyrian texts, a land between Babylonia and Elam. If this is correct, then the Jewish community behind the papyrus may originally have been deported by the Assyrians to Samaria. Of these groups, the Books of Kings records that they "would venerate the Lord [YHWH] but serve their own gods according to the practices of the nations from which they had been exiled," which is consistent with the polytheism expressed in Amherst 63.[5]

Amherst 63 was probably dictated in the early third century BC by an Aramaic-speaking Jewish priest to an Egyptian scribe with fourth-century training.[6] Some of the text, however, is considerably older and must predate the Assyrian captivity in 722 BC. The compilation, however, probably post-dates 701, when Sennacherib's campaign in the Levant forced many Samarians to take refuge in Aram, leading to the displacement of Hebrew by Aramaic. The last tale on the papyrus refers to the death of Šamaš-šuma-ukin in 648 BC and must have been added after that date if the entire corpus was not put together later.[7] It may have been compiled for the inauguration of a renovated temple of Nabu in the city of Palmyra in the seventh century, the predecessor of the Roman-era temple of Nabu.[8]

Amherst 63 contains 434 lines in 23 columns without any clear marks of division.[9] Richard C. Steiner thought it represented an extended liturgy for a New Year's festival.[6] Karel van der Toorn agrees that much of it concerns a New Year's festival, but sees a compilation of about 35 distinct texts grouped into five sections.[10]

Three of the texts may be described as psalms. These are "May Yaho Answer Us in Our Troubles" (at col. xii, lines 11–19), "Our Banquet Is for You" (xiii, 1–10) and "The Host of Heaven Proclaims Your Rule" (xiii, 11–17).[11] The first of these is a polytheistic version of Psalm 20 from the Hebrew Bible.[12] Martin Rösel has noted parallels between the second and the biblical Psalm 75.[13]

Amherst 63 was part of a group of twenty papyri discovered in an earthen jar at Thebes late in the 19th century.[14][15] These were the "new papyri" acquired by Lord Amherst of Hackney in 1896, after work on cataloguing his collection had already begun. In the published catalogue of 1899, the "new papyri" are allotted a range of numbers. The whole collection of Amherst papyri was later acquired by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, but Amherst 63 did not arrive there until 1947.[16] A few fragments of the same papryus also wound up in the University of Michigan Library (now Michigan-Amherst 43b).[3] It was finally assigned a specific number from the catalogue range by Theodore C. Petersen at that time. It had remained a mystery, because its demotic script did not encode Egyptian, until Raymond Bowman identified it as Aramaic on the basis of photographs in 1944.[17] It was finally deciphered only in the 1980s and the first published edition appeared in 1997.[18]

• Amherst Egyptian Papyrus 63.1
• Amherst Egyptian Papyrus 63.2
• Amherst Egyptian Papyrus 63.3
• Amherst Egyptian Papyrus 63.4
• Amherst Egyptian Papyrus 63.5
• Amherst Egyptian Papyrus 63.6