Overview

The Ramesseum papyri were composed in the late Middle Kingdom and discovered in a wooden box at the bottom of a tomb shaft during British excavations carried out in 1895-1896 on the west bank of Thebes. Half of them, i.e. one cursive and twelve hieratic documents, comprise the earliest collection of magical papyri known to this day. Often compared to the other two famous magical libraries known (the Chester-Beatty papyri for the New Kingdom and the Wilbour papyri for the Late Period), the magical papyri from the Ramesseum, today preserved at the British Museum, were published in 1955 by Sir Alan H. Gardiner in a volume of plates, and are here studied systematically for the first time. Due to their poor state of conservation, the deciphering of these very fragile and fragmentary documents often represents a conundrum. Although most of the spells are apparently unique to these papyri, several parallels could be identified in earlier or later sources. New hypotheses are also proposed on the user of these documents and on their geographic origin.

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