Nessana Papyri

This article first appeared in ISAW Newsletter 24, Spring 2019.

Workshop organized by Robert Hoyland (ISAW)
Professor of Late Antique and Early Islamic Middle Eastern History

In March 2019 a workshop was convened on the subject of Nessana, a small village of Roman and Early Islamic Palestine that has nevertheless yielded rich insights into the rural life of this province as a result of the hoard of papyri that was found there in the course of excavations in the 1930s. Academics from Israel, the Netherlands, Great Britain and America came to debate what one might learn from these texts, in terms of the social, economic and intellectual milieu that generated them, and how one might make them better known.

Running parallel with the workshop were three related projects. The first aims to make the images of the papyri available online (spearheaded by Dr. Eline Scheerlinck of Leiden University and David Ratzan of ISAW). The second seeks to study the documentation pertaining to the 1930s excavations, which is available on the website of the Israeli Antiquities Authority; a trawl through this has led to a number of exciting discoveries, including the photographs of five extra Arabic papyri that for some reason never made it to the Morgan Library in New York with the rest of the collection. And the third project, which is still ongoing, intends to investigate the non-papyrus objects uncovered at Nessana, such as the coins, textiles and inscribed ostraca; the latter were found by Roger Bagnall (ISAW) housed in NYU’s Bobst library and examined by Kyle Brunner (ISAW).