Elephantine papyri and ostraca
The documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives and are thus an invaluable source of knowledge for scholars of varied disciplines such as epistolography, law, society, religion, language, and onomastics.
Legal documents and a cache of letters survived, turned up on the local "grey market" of antiquities starting in the late 19th century, and were scattered into several Western collections.
It is widely agreed that this Elephantine community originated in the mid-seventh or mid-sixth centuries BCE, likely as a result of Judean and Samaritan refugees fleeing into Egypt during the times of Assyrian and Babylonian invasions.
[12] Also important is the fact that the papyri document the existence of a small Jewish temple at Elephantine, which possessed altars for incense offerings and animal sacrifices, as late as 411 BCE.
[12] Upon first examination, this appears to contradict commonly accepted models of the development of Jewish religion and the dating of the Hebrew scriptures, which posit that monotheism and the Torah should have already been well-established by the time these papyri were written.
Most scholars explain this apparent discrepancy by theorizing that the Elephantine Jews represented an isolated remnant of Jewish religious practices from earlier centuries,[10]: 32 or that the Torah had only recently been promulgated at that time.
They (the Persians) knocked down all the temples of the gods of Egypt, but no one did any damage to this temple.The community also appealed for aid to Sanballat I, a Samaritan potentate, and his sons Delaiah and Shelemiah, as well as Johanan ben Eliashib.
In 2004, the Brooklyn Museum created a display entitled "Jewish Life in Ancient Egypt: A Family Archive From the Nile Valley," which featured the interfaith couple of Ananiah, an official at the temple of Yahou (a.k.a.
[23][24][25] Some related exhibition didactics of 2002 included comments about significant structural similarities between Judaism and the ancient Egyptian religion and how they easily coexisted and blended at Elephantine.
Egyptian farmers discovered the archive of Ananiah and Tamut on Elephantine Island in 1893, while digging for fertilizer in the remains of ancient mud-brick houses.
As an institution, slavery in Egypt at that time differed in notable ways from the practice in some other cultures: Egyptian slaves retained control over personal property, had professions, and were entitled to compensation.
This document to the right describes a property purchased by Ananiah, twelve years after his marriage, from a Persian soldier named Bagazust and his wife, Ubil.
The property, in a town on Elephantine Island, named for the god Khnum, was located across the street from the Temple of Yauh and adjacent to the Persian family of Ubil's father.
[35] Drawn up thirty years after the preceding papyrus, this document is one of several that gradually transferred ownership of Ananiah and Tamut's house to their daughter, Yehoishema, as payment on her dowry.
Possibly because the clients were dissatisfied with something the scribe had written, at one point the text of the document breaks off and then starts over again, repeating what has gone on before with some additions.
The boundary description included here refers to the Temple of Yauh in Elephantine, now rebuilt eight years after its destruction in 410 BCE during a civil war conflict that arose out of a land dispute.
The receipt demonstrates that friendly business relations continued between Egyptians and Jews in Elephantine after the expulsion of the Persians by Amyrtaeus, the only pharaoh of the Twenty-eighth Dynasty of Egypt.
