Other worshipers of Jehovah might have settled in Egypt when the Northern Kingdom of Israel was destroyed in 722 B.C.E.Īlthough Ananiah was a temple official, most of the Jews in Elephantine were government soldiers.
By 586 B.C.E., there may have been Jews already living in Egypt: More than a hundred years earlier, King Hezekiah of Judah (727–697 B.C.E.) had sent mercenaries to his Egyptian allies.
#PAPYRUS DRAWING EGYPT ARCHIVE#
as part of a divine punishment, but documents, including the archive of Ananiah and Tamut on view in this exhibition, reveal a prosperous community. The Hebrew Bible describes the Jews’ return to Egypt in 586 B.C.E. … all the chiefs of the military forces and all the people…came into the land of Egypt… Along with similar archives now housed in Berlin and Oxford, the Brooklyn papyri are the oldest extra-Biblical evidence for Jews in ancient Egypt.Īnd Jehovah will send you back to Egypt…and you will have to sell yourselves there to your enemies as slaves, and there will be no buyer. These papyri, written in Aramaic, allow a fascinating glimpse into the daily life of this couple, and include evidence for active Jewish involvement in Egyptian culture. The culmination of this exhibition is Ananiah and Tamut’s family archive, a set of eight papyri created between 449 and 402 B.C.E. One possibly Jewish object, a sarcophagus lid, is included in this presentation. Due to the Biblical prohibition against imagemaking, specifically Jewish objects from this period are virtually unknown. The Egyptian and Persian antiquities in these galleries illustrate the historical and religious issues that shaped the lives of Ananiah and Tamut. Ananiah and Tamut’s story may seem familiar-they married, bought a house, and raised two children-yet their world also included slavery and animal sacrifice to the gods. Evidence suggests that they lived in a cosmopolitan, multicultural, and multilingual society tolerant of religious and ethnic diversity interfaith marriage was not uncommon. Ananiah and Tamut lived on Elephantine (pronounced Elephan-TEE-nee), an island in the Nile River, in the fifth century B.C.E. Jewish Life in Ancient Egypt: A Family Archive from the Nile Valley tells the story of Ananiah, a Jewish temple official, and his wife, Tamut, an Egyptian slave.
Eight hundred years after Moses led the Exodus, Jews had returned to Egypt.
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