Papyrus for the People Louise Bascombe, Anna Garnett and Maria Ragan discuss an important Petrie Museum project that is bringing ancient texts to life. '{sT<l ----------- \ 2M ««* jjk/ TTYTT-TT v ^ J a y ^ 'A ® * i>>xz* .............. , .... ^tesssm&w 1 **• •.- ^ S,&)> -j T hree and a half thousand years ago, an Egyptian woman called Irer wrote to her superior to report management’s neglect of the weavers: “The Lord should spend a day here [...] the threads are set up without being able to be woven!” (UC 32203). The text as a whole is a dramatic and direct insight into the ancient Egyptian world, as it is an exceptionally rare example written by a woman. Literacy was generally reserved for males, but her assertiveness speaks volumes. It is just one of hundreds of voices collected together in UCL’s Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology from around 3000 BC to the present day. More than 2000 documents in the collection (such as the ‘ Arabic charm’ above) illustrate many scripts and societies, representing multi- ple identities, faiths and world-views. While basic regis- tration of this material has been set up and academic works written about the collection, the voices themselves are inaccessible to the majority of the museum’s users as they are locked up in technical terminology. The Lahun Papyri The Petrie Museum’s papyrus collection is world-class and of international interest, including such rare and unique examples as one of the oldest legal manuscripts (a will) from Egypt dating to 1818 BC (UC32037), some of the world’s oldest medical texts (including the only known gynaecological papyrus, UC32057), the only and oldest known veterinary text (UC32036), and some of the world’s earliest mathematical problems on paper (UC32160 and UC32162). What makes these papyri even more significant is how they were acquired. While most papyri collections come from the art market, the museum’s papyri were recovered during excavations by Flinders Petrie and his Egyptian workforce (between 1889 and 1899) amidst the refuse of an ancient Egyptian town at the site of Lahun in the Fayum. The ‘Lahun Papyri’ is the largest known collection of surviving Middle Kingdom papyri (c.2025-1700 BC), from a site that also produced an exceptional number of objects of daily life, now housed in the Petrie Museum. Papyrus for the People In 2016, the Petrie Museum was awarded a grant from Arts Council England’s Designation Development Fund, which celebrates and champions significant collections of national and international importance held outside national museums, for our Papyrus fo r the People Project. This ambitious 18-month project aimed to improve access to the papyri and ostraca collections both physi- cally and socially, making them accessible in every sense. The first stage of the project involved the specialised conservation of the papyri and ostraca collections by Vania Assis (Manuscripts Conservator, British Library — see opposite bottom) and Susi Pancaldo (Senior Conservator, T2 A ncient H gyft June/Julq 2013