Tebtynis

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Small temple
Processional Street

Tebtynis or Tebtunis was a city in Ancient Egypt . The modern village is called Tell Umm el-Baragat and is located in the Al-Fayyum governorate .

history

Tebtynis was around 1800 BC. By Amenemhet III. founded. The city flourished especially in the Greco-Roman period , at which time it was called Theodosiopolis . In late antiquity it belonged to the province of Arcadia and was located north of Hermopolis Magna .

The early Christian diocese of Theodosiopolis in Arcadia is now a titular diocese . It belonged to the ecclesiastical province of Ossirinco ( Oxyrhynchos ) and has not been occupied since 1967.

Excavations and papyrus finds

The center of the place is the Temple of Soknebtynis , i.e. H. of "Sobek, Lord of Tebtynis", who is on the southern edge of the settlement. There is a small courtyard in front of the naos . The complex is surrounded by an enclosure wall that also encloses other buildings, including a small secondary temple and numerous priest cells. In front of the entrance is the vestibule , to which a bent dromos with two kiosks leads.

The first excavations at this site were carried out in 1899/1900 by the two English papyrologists B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt. They uncovered parts of the Soknebtynis temple and the surrounding settlement, where they found numerous Greek and demotic papyri - the actual goal of their excavations. They also discovered a large number of crocodile burials in the necropolis , and more Greek papyri were found in the mummy covers . Several demotic cult association statutes were probably attached to the burials. Many comparatively modest graves were also found. The mummies of the residents of Tebtynis were covered with cardboard masks and pads, from which numerous other papyri could later be obtained.

When dividing the finds, most of the demotic papyri came to Cairo , while the Greek papyri and those still in the cardboard boxes were first sent to Oxford for processing and later - after the death of Grenfell and Hunt - to the Bancroft Library of the University of California ; the last previously overlooked boxes have only recently arrived there. The Center for the Tebtunis Papyri (CTP), founded in 2000, deals with the evaluation of these Tebtunis Papyri .

The Tebtynis papyri in other museums, particularly the British Museum in London , the Papyrus Collection of the University of Michigan and the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection in Copenhagen , come from robbery excavations by locals; they were acquired from the art trade. The British Museum includes a. about 50 partly fragmentary demotic hierodulic documents. At the University of Michigan, a. Large parts of the archives of Kronion , son of Apion , the head of the graph of Tebtynis are kept. In contrast, it was mainly literary texts in demotic and hieratic script that reached Copenhagen. They are sure to come from the library at Soknebtynis Temple.

literature

  • The results of the Franco-Italian excavations in Tebtynis have been published since 2000 in the Fouilles de l'Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale du Caire series. (FIFAO) ( ISSN  0768-4703 ) published by the Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale (IFAO).
  • Kim Ryholt (Ed.): Narrative literature from the Tebtunis temple library. Carsten Niebuhr Institute, Copenhagen 2009, ISBN 978-87-635-0780-6
  • Sandra Lippert , Maren Schentuleit (eds.): Tebtynis and Soknopaiu Nesos. Life in Roman Fajum. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-447-05141-8 .
  • Jürgen Osing: Hieratic papyri from Tebtunis I. 2 vol. Carsten Niebuhr Institute of Ancient Eastern Studies, Copenhagen 1998, ISBN 87-7289-280-3
  • Arthur MFW Verhoogt: The Tebtunis Papyri at The Bancroft Library. In: Bancroftiana. 107 (1994) pp. 4-7.
  • Elinor M. Husselman, Arthur ER Boak & William F. Edgerton (Eds.): Papyri from Tebtunis. 2 vols. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1933 a. 1944
  • Bernard P. Grenfell, Arthur S. Hunt and J. Gilbart Smyly (Eds.): The Tebtunis Papyri. 3 vols. Smyly, London 1902ff

Web links

Coordinates: 29 ° 7 ′ 0 ″  N , 30 ° 45 ′ 0 ″  E