Le Papyrus Harris I (BM 9999).

• Author: MURNANE, WILLIAM J.
• Position: Review

Le Papyrus Harris 1 (BM 9999). By PIERRE GRANDET. Bibliotheque d'etude, vols. 109.1-2. Cairo: L'INSTITUT FRANCAIS D'ARCHEOLOGIE ORIENTALE DU CAIRE, 1994. Pp. xxxix + 342; xvi + 352, 80 plates. FF 600 (paper).

Students of antiquity, so notoriously short of source materials in the best of circumstances, find themselves especially embarrassed when they approach socio-economic topics. Egyptologists are scarcely more fortunate than others in this respect, although for them the problem is not dependence on one type of record (such as, for classicists, literary instead of documentary sources: see M. I. Finley, "Documents," in idem, Ancient History: Evidence and Models [New York: Viking Penguin, 1986], 27-31). Rather, the difficulty is one of scale--for although large numbers of administrative documents survive from certain localities (e.g., Thebes) and periods (Dynasties 19-20 and later antiquity), few of these records are detailed or extensive enough to supply the sort of statistics that underpin analyses of more recent periods. Fortunately, there are some exceptions to this rule--most notably, Papyrus Harris I, in which Ramesses III (c. 1184-1153 B.C.E.) detailed the benefactions he supplied to the gods and his subjects over the course of his reign. At nearly forty-two meters, this is the longest continuous document to have survived from pharaonic Egypt, and it is just about four times longer than the comparably significant land survey that was written about a decade later, Papyrus Wilbour. The latter is very well published with an extensive commentary (Alan H. Gardiner, The Wilbour Papyrus, 4 volumes [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1948). By contrast, Papyrus Harris I (henceforth "P.H. I" here, as in the book under review) has been less fortunate: having been published in stages (facsimile in 1876, and a glossary in 1882, but a complete hieroglyphic transcription only in 1933), the edition was both spotty and inconvenient. Moreover, the only complete, easily accessible translation dates from 1906; and although some of the data has been well studied, there has been up to now no comprehensive study of the document as a whole. With this detailed translation and commentary, however, that gap has finally, and handsomely, been filled.

Pierre Grandet's study of EH. I is, in fact, astonishingly thorough, going so far beyond the predictable linguistic and historical bases that the following summary does scant justice to its range. After a description of...