Amherst papyri

The Amherst papyri are a collection of ancient papyri now mostly kept in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.

[1] They were acquired by John Pierpont Morgan in 1912.

[2] They are named for Lord Amherst of Hackney, who began assembling the collection in the 1860s through purchases from R. T. Lieder and John Lee.

[3] He kept them at Didlington Hall in Norfolk.

[1] The collection includes or included 42 papyri in Egyptian written in hieroglyphic or hieratic script;[2] 84 in Coptic, of which only 37 were ever catalogued, the rest being described as "very decayed, powdery and worthless";[2] and 237 mainly in Demotic Egyptian and Greek, but including a few in Coptic, Arabic and Latin.