65 IEJ 74 (2024): 000–000 Forgotten Papyri of the Judaean Desert: The Khirbet Mird Corpus from Late Antiquity to Early Islam Robert Hoyland 1 ABSTRACT: This article provides a detailed overview of the corpus of papyri discovered in the 1950s in a cave by the Monastery of Kastellion, known in Arabic as Khirbet Mird, in the Judean Desert between Bethlehem and the Dead Sea. The papyri are written in Greek, Aramaic, and Arabic, and they span the Late Antique and early Islamic periods (ca 500-800 CE). The article also attempts to explain why Christian and Muslim documents ended up in the same collection and to illustrate how these texts might contribute to our knowledge about the Monastery of Kastellion and our understanding of the administration of early Islamic Palestine. Three documents are edited for the first time in order to demonstrate the diversity of this corpus. Keywords: Khirbet Mird, papyri, Late Antiquity, early Islam, Palestine, Jerusalem, Greek, Arabic, Aramaic On an isolated peak between the Dead Sea and Bethlehem, and just 4 km northeast of the famous Monastery of Mar Saba (Fig. 1), are a scatter of ruined buildings that constitute the remains of a fort (Hyrcania), either constructed anew or restored from an earlier structure by Herod the Great (37–4 BCE). It was then abandoned for centuries until transformed in the late fifth century CE into a monastery, referred to in Greek as Kastellion and in Syriac as Mardā, which lies behind the later Arabic name of Khirbet Mird (“the ruins of Mird”). 1 In or around it, the TaꜤāmirah Bedouin of the Judaean desert 2 discovered a cache of Greek, Arabic, and Christian Palestinian Aramaic (CPA) papyri, most of which they sold in July 1952 to the Palestine Archaeological Museum (giving these papyri the designation 1 Institute of the Study of the Ancient World, New York University Contact: Robert Hoyland rgh2@nyu.edu 1 This is the usual form of the toponym (already in Conder et al. 1883: 212: “Khŭrbet Mird”), but occasionally it is written with the definite article: Khirbet el-Mird (thus Grohmann 1963). 2 Robinson and Smith (1841: 176–181) give some account of the TaꜤāmirah in the mid- nineteenth century and say “they may be said to occupy, in general, the district lying between Bethlehem, Tekoa, and the Dead Sea.”