Welcome to the 2025-2026 academic year! We in the ISAW Library kicked off the Fall 2025 term with a standing-room-only crowd on Sept. 9, 2025, who came to listen to Dr. Leah Mascia lecture on "The materiality of death in the transitional phase: The funerary landscape of Roman Egypt." We in the ISAW Library would like to thank our partners in bringing Dr. Mascia to ISAW, the Metropolitan Museum of New York and the New York chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE-NY).

Dr. Mascia gave a masterful presentation of recent archaeological at the city of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, a city famous for the papyrus texts which were recovered there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but less so for its archaeology. Indeed, one of the most impressive elements of Dr. Mascia's work is the integration of textual and archaeological remains, and showing how each illuminates the other when it comes to understanding continuity and change in Egyptian funerary practice, from multiple perspectives, iconographic, religious, and administrative. Some of the most impressive new finds were mummified individuals buried with papyrus packets affixed to their abdomens and sealed with a clay sealing. Talk about the integration of text and material culture!

Dr. Mascia is is a Post-Doctoral researcher in Egyptology and Coptology and head of the "Inscribing Spaces" team in the Cluster of Excellence "Understanding Written Artifacts" at Hamburg University's Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures. She is also a Post-Doctoral at the Egyptological Seminar of the Freie Universität in Berlin and the Principal Investigator of the project “The Long Journey to the Underworld” (March 2022-December 2025), which studies the production of inscribed funerary artifacts in Egypt between the Roman and the Late Antique periods. A trained field archaeologist and papyrologist, Dr. Mascia is a senior member of the Archaeological Mission of the University of Barcelona working in the ancient site of Oxyrhynchus, where she is in charge of the papyrological and epigraphic documentation, and a senior member of the Archaeological mission of the University of Urbino investigating the ancient city of Cyrene (mod. Libya). Her first monograph, The Transition from Traditional Cults to the Affirmation of Christian Beliefs in the City of Oxyrhynchus, will be published in Fall 2025 by Franz Steiner.

The next talk in the ISAW Library lecture series will be Candida Moss delivering a lecture entitled, "Invisible Hands: The Hidden Labor Behind Ancient Texts and Libraries" on Oct. 7, 2025. Register here.

Here is a sneak preview ...

When we imagine the origins of the Bible or the great libraries of the ancient world, we picture apostles, philosophers, or politicians—visionary figures whose words have endured across centuries. But behind ancient Greek and Latin scrolls and manuscripts lay an invisible workforce: the enslaved and marginalized individuals who copied texts, archived collections, and carried knowledge across empires. Candida Moss will uncover the hidden labor that made the ancient literary world possible. Drawing from her research in God’s Ghostwriters, she reveals how enslaved scribes, copyists, and curators were essential to the production, preservation, and dissemination of the texts we now regard as sacred or canonical. From the bustling scriptoria of Rome to the private libraries of early Christian communities, Prof. Moss traces how power, literacy, and servitude intersected in the shadows of history.