The majority of the new and unplaced fragments that belong to this manuscript include no legible words, but due to the unique material and textual characteristics of that manuscript, more time is needed to evaluate those fragments. This text is written on a manuscript that exhibits many compositional acts and reusages. a–b), which is the longest surviving Imperial Aramaic ( IA) papyrus document and contains the narrative of the legendary Ahiqar, scribe of Sennacherib and Esarhaddon, along with proverbs ascribed to him. In the box remain many literary fragments, most of which have been determined to belong to the Ahiqar manuscript (Pap. It also includes all fragments with one or more legible words from record rolls. written perpendicular to the recto’s papyrus fibers) and for which at least one word is legible or reconstructed with a fairly high degree of certainty. The fragments edited in this volume include all fragments written transversa charta (i.e. It is my conviction along with that of Verena Lepper and Bernd Schipper, who collaborated to help conceive this project, that the Aramaic Box also be made available to the scholarly community as quickly as possible and by using the latest technology available. By using the highest quality photographic technology and the latest advances in Aramaic studies in 1911, Sachau made available to the scholarly community the Aramaic papyri excavated by the Germans at Elephantine within four years of their discovery. Seeing that these papyri were probably the most difficult pieces to work with and that the present volume is also bound by funding, time, and project constraints, it is asked that the reader remember these restrictions, should oversights or misjudgments be found herein. The fragments in the Aramaic Box appear to be those which neither Sachau nor the conservator Hugo Ibscher could place and apparently were deemed too small to edit given the timeframe of Sachau’s project. The Aramaic Box consists of papyri fragments left over from Eduard Sachau’s 1911 edition of Aramaic documents. The present volume is a more thorough analysis of a selection of documentary papyri from the Aramaic Box. Working photographs of all the fragments as well as preliminary readings are available through the ERC-funded digital edition and project, Localizing 4,000 Years of Cultural History: Texts and Scripts from Elephantine Island, Egypt (Grant ID 637692). These fragments are available in two locations. The objective of this volume is to publish the legible documentary papyri from the over 800 Aramaic papyri fragments discovered in an uncatalogued container known as the Aramaic Box and found in 2014 in the Staatliche Museum zu Berlin, Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung. The present contribution is a continuation of this long history of Elephantine Aramaic editions.

Since Cowley wrote his exceptional volume, Aramaic Papyri, which predominantly focused on manuscripts from Elephantine, scholarship has seen the publication of hundreds of Persian period Aramaic sources, including many more from Elephantine. This statement by Arthur Cowley is just as true today as it was in 1923 when he penned it. No apology need be made for re-editing these texts, for every fresh examination sheds fresh light on them, and in spite of the very extensive literature to which they have given rise, much still remains to be done.

Pixel check mark box papyrus