Papyrus Amherst 63

Papyrus Amherst 63 (CoS 1.99) is an ancient Egyptian papyrus from the third century BC containing Aramaic texts in demotic script. The 35 texts date to the eighth and seventh centuries BC. One of these, a version of Psalm 20, provides an "unprecedented" extrabiblical parallel to a text from the Hebrew Bible. It syncretizes abundantly, including the names Yaho and Bethel, and mentions a khnh, a word meaning priestess of Yaho.

Origin
Amherst 63 was originally a single papyrus scroll with a length of 12 ft, written on both sides. It was created by and for the Jewish diaspora communities in the Egyptian cities of Elephantine and Aswan. The homeland of this community is called rš or ʾrš in the text, which may be identical with the Rashu of Neo-Assyrian texts, a land between Babylonia and Elam. If this is correct, then the Jewish community behind the papyrus may originally have been deported by the Assyrians to Samaria. Of these groups, the Books of Kings records that they "would venerate the Lord [YHWH] but serve their own gods according to the practices of the nations from which they had been exiled," which is consistent with the polytheism expressed in Amherst 63.

Amherst 63 was probably dictated in the early third century BC by an Aramaic-speaking Jewish priest to an Egyptian scribe with fourth-century training. Some of the text, however, is considerably older and must predate the Assyrian captivity in 722 BC. The compilation, however, probably post-dates 701 BC, when Sennacherib's campaign in the Levant forced many Samarians to take refuge in Aram, leading to the displacement of Hebrew by Aramaic. The last tale on the papyrus refers to the death of Šamaš-šuma-ukin in 648 BC and must have been added after that date if the entire corpus was not put together later. It may have been compiled for the inauguration of a renovated temple of Nabu in the city of Palmyra in the seventh century, the predecessor of the Roman-era Temple of Nabu (Palmyra).

Contents
Amherst 63 contains 434 lines in 23 columns without any clear marks of division. Richard C. Steiner thought it represented an extended liturgy for a New Year's festival. Karel van der Toorn agrees that much of it concerns a New Year's festival, but adds that it was a combination of the "rites of the year" and ḥodeš, "the new moon (festival)." Van der Toorn sees a compilation of about 35 distinct texts grouped into five sections.


 * 1) The Babylonians
 * 2) "Magnificat for the Lady of the Sanctuary"
 * 3) "May the Lady Rear Her Child"
 * 4) "He Smells as Pleasant as You"


 * 1) "I Am the Cow"
 * 2) "Nabu Chooses His Bride"
 * 3) "The Judge at the Gate"


 * 1) "A Blessing"


 * 1) "Kings Saw You and Were Fearful"
 * 2) "My Gift Is for You on New Year's Day"
 * 3) The Syrians
 * 4) "They Put Their Hands in Shackles"
 * 5) "What the God of Rash Said"
 * 6) "My Servant, Do Not Fear"
 * 7) "A Dwelling for Bethel
 * 8) "Bethel's Beauty Contest"
 * 9) "Praying for Rain"
 * 10) "Hope for the Fugitives"
 * 11) "Father of the Orphan, Champion of the Widow"


 * 1) "The Lord of Thunderstorms"


 * 1) "Dreaming of the City in Rash"


 * 1) "Prayer against Enemies"
 * 2) The Samarians
 * 3) "A Desolate City under Tall Cedars"
 * 4) "May Yaho Answer Us in Our Troubles"
 * 5) "Our Banquet Is for You"
 * 6) "The Host of Heaven Proclaims Your Rule"
 * 7) In Palmyra
 * 8) "Lady, Restore Your Sanctuary!"
 * 9) "A Reign of Everlasting Peace"
 * 10) "Haddu, Bless Gaddi-El!"
 * 11) "Evening in the City of Palms"
 * 12) "Song to the Rising Sun"
 * 13) "The God Who Answers with Fire"


 * 1) "Shelter for the Samarians"
 * 2) "Nanay and Her Lover"
 * 3) "A Blessing before Bethel"


 * 1) Appendix
 * 2) "A Complaint among the Cedars"
 * 3) "A Tale of Two Brothers"

Three of the texts may be described as psalms. These are "May Yaho Answer Us in Our Troubles" (at col. xii, lines 11–19), "Our Banquet Is for You" (xiii, 1–10) and "The Host of Heaven Proclaims Your Rule" (xiii, 11–17). The first of these is a polytheistic version of Psalm 20 from the Hebrew Bible. Martin Rösel has noted parallels between the second and the biblical Psalm 75.

Mar and Marah
The papyrus often uses the word Mar or feminine Marah. In some Semitic languages, including Aramaic, these words mean lord and lady. Van der Toorn thought some Mar references might have been added later by an imagined Aramean editor, since they seemed "burdensome" of the poem.

Excerpt
Subscript numbers indicate same consonant and different sign. For wiki formatting this excerpt shows interpunct ("●") instead of the pipe ("|") used by Van der Toorn. Context from different translation:

A Psalm from Bethel (XI.11–19) May Horus answer us in our troubles; may Adonai answer us in our troubles. O crescent (lit., bow) / bowman in heaven, Sahar / shine forth; send your emissary from the temple of Arash, and from Zephon may Horus help us.

Discovery and decipherment
Amherst 63 was part of a group of twenty papyri discovered in an earthen jar at Thebes late in the 19th century. These were the "new papyri" acquired by William Tyssen-Amherst in 1896, after work on cataloguing his collection had already begun. In the published catalogue of 1899, the "new papyri" are allotted a range of numbers. The whole collection of Amherst papyri was later acquired by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City, but Amherst 63 did not arrive there until 1947. A few fragments of the same papryus also wound up in the University of Michigan Library (now Michigan-Amherst 43b). It was finally assigned a specific number from the catalogue range by Theodore C. Petersen at that time. It had remained a mystery, because its demotic script did not encode Egyptian, until Raymond Bowman identified it as Aramaic on the basis of photographs in 1944. As such, it is an example of allography. It was finally deciphered only in the 1980s. Parts were first published in 1983 and the first full edition appeared only in 1997.

Another instance of Aramaic in demotic
In 2001, R. C. Steiner called a scorpion spell from Wadi Hammamat "another Aramaic text in demotic script". The scholar who discovered it had earlier dismissed it as "Zauberworte", magical nonsense—as is sometimes interpreted in other artifacts like curse bowls.