Visiting Scholar Spotlight: Jacco Dieleman

By Jacco Dieleman
02/11/2016

This fall term I was fortunate to work as a Visiting Scholar at ISAW. This gave me the opportunity to continue what I started as a Visiting Research Scholar back in 2010-11. My stay was as productive and enjoyable as four years ago. The faculty, students, and staff make ISAW such a comfortable and stimulating environment to work.

My research is concerned with the question of how Egyptian scribal culture responded to the political, economic, cultural, and linguistic challenges posed by the imposition of Hellenistic and Roman rule (4th c. BCE–4th c. CE). This final episode of pharaonic Egypt’s long-standing written culture is usually described in terms of decline and death, and studied from the perspectives of language shift (the suppression of native Egyptian in favor of high-status Greek) and script obsolescence (the gradual loss of competence in both the hieroglyphic and cursive writing systems). Without denying the reality and relevancy of these two phenomena, I prefer taking a more positive approach. I do not start from the hindsight that Egyptian written culture ended, but from the observation that its final centuries are characterized by an explosion of creativity in the production of ritual manuscripts. Ritual manuscripts are my main dataset, because, together with kingship, ritual was the most central and defining institution of pharaonic culture. Changes in the format of ritual scripts, so is my contention, are accordingly indicative of transformations in the self-image and self-understanding of pharaonic culture.

The cornerstone of my project remains the critical edition of a papyrus scroll inscribed in hieratic and demotic cursive characters with the instructions and incantations adapted from temple handbooks for the burial of a private individual. I call the manuscript the ‘Artemis Liturgical Papyrus’ after the woman for whom it was inscribed. She must have lived and died in the late Hellenistic or early Roman period. The ritual text is significant for its makeshift character, pieced together from excerpts taken from various ritual compositions into a unique, unified ritual script. In this regard, it breaks with received text models and offers the opportunity to study how an innovative scribe engaged with written tradition. Deciphering the cursive, oftentimes abraded writing is challenging but rewarding. It is exciting to recover the thought process of a learned scribe who lived and worked in a period of radical social and cultural change. He was no slave to the tradition. Instead he searched for new text formats to make ritual knowledge and practices of the past relevant for the present.

Read more about Jacco on his biography page here

This single sheet of papyrus from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (inv. no. ÄS 3865) preserves a copy of the so-called Liturgy of the Decade Festival of Djeme. It was inscribed in the first or second century CE and formed probably part of the burial assemblage of an Egyptian priest, who lived and worked in Thebes in southern Egypt.