page_title: Elephantine papyri
section_title: Jewish temple at Elephantine
hierarchical_section_title: Elephantine papyri / Jewish temple at Elephantine
caption_attribution_description: English: Approximate location of the Temple of Yahu at Elephantine, based on the excavation work of Cornelius von Pilgrim
context_page_description: The Elephantine Papyri consist of 175 documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Aswan, which yielded hundreds of papyri in hieratic and demotic Egyptian, Aramaic, Koine Greek, Latin and Coptic, spanning a period of 100 years. The documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives, and are thus an invaluable source of knowledge for scholars of varied disciplines such as epistolography, law, society, religion, language and onomastics. They are a collection of ancient Jewish manuscripts dating from the 5th century BCE. They come from a Jewish community at Elephantine, then called ꜣbw. The dry soil of Upper Egypt preserved the documents.
  Hundreds of these Elephantine papyri span a period of 100 years. Legal documents and a cache of letters survived, turned up on the local "grey market" of antiquities starting in the late 19th century, and were scattered into several Western collections.
context_section_description: The Jews had their own temple to Yahweh which functioned alongside that of the Egyptian god Khnum. Along with Yahweh, other deities – ʿAnat Betel and Asham Bethel – seem to have been worshiped by these Jews, evincing polytheistic beliefs.
  Excavation work done in 1967 revealed the remains of the Jewish colony centered on a small temple.
  The "Petition to Bagoas" (Sayce-Cowley collection) is a letter written in 407 BCE to Bagoas, the Persian governor of Judea, appealing for assistance in rebuilding the Jewish temple in Elephantine, which had recently been badly damaged by an anti-Jewish rampage on the part of a segment of the Elephantine community.
  In the course of this appeal, the Jewish inhabitants of Elephantine speak of the antiquity of the damaged temple:
  Now our forefathers built this temple in the fortress of Elephantine back in the days of the kingdom of Egypt, and when Cambyses came to Egypt he found it built. They (the Persians) knocked down all the temples of the gods of Egypt, but no one did any damage to this temple.
  The community also appealed for aid to Sanballat I, a Samaritan potentate, and his sons Delaiah and Shelemiah, as well as Johanan ben Eliashib. Both Sanballat and Johanan are mentioned in the Book of Nehemiah, 2:19, 12:23.
  There was a response of both governors (Bagoas and Delaiah) which gave the permission by decree to rebuild the temple written in the form of a memorandum:
  "₁Memorandum of what Bagohi and Delaiah said ₂to me, saying: Memorandum: You may say in Egypt ... ₈to (re)build it on its site as it was formerly...".
  By the middle of the 4th century BCE, the temple at Elephantine had ceased to function. There is evidence from excavations that the rebuilding and enlargement of the Khnum temple under Nectanebo II (360–343) took the place of the former temple of YHWH.
  In 2004, the Brooklyn Museum of Art created a display entitled "Jewish Life in Ancient Egypt: A Family Archive From the Nile Valley," which featured the interfaith couple of Ananiah, an official at the temple of Yahou (a.k.a. Yahweh), and his wife, Tamut, who was previously an Egyptian slave owned by a Jewish master, Meshullam. Some related exhibition didactics of 2002 included comments about significant structural similarities between Judaism and the ancient Egyptian religion and how they easily coexisted and blended at Elephantine.
caption: Approximate location and size of the temple courtyard, based on the 1967 excavation work and a reconstructed city plan devised by Stephen G. Rosenburg
exif: {}