GESHAEM

Marie-Pierre Chaufray

Marie-Pierre Chaufray is currently a research fellow in papyrology at the CNRS, assigned to the Ausonius laboratory at the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne. Her dual training in Greek papyrology and Demotic Egyptian, and her specialization in the study of everyday texts (accounts, contracts, letters) allow her to address issues related to multiculturalism and the economic and social history of Egypt in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

Project summary

The GESHAEM project aims to study a still largely unknown papyrological corpus, the Jouguet collection of the Sorbonne, which should change our view of early Ptolemaic administration by re-evaluating the indigenous Egyptian contribution in the construction of the first Ptolemaic kingdom. The Jouguet collection contains administrative and fiscal papyri, in Greek and in Egyptian, discovered in Egyptian mummies from the Fayum region. Coming from bilingual archives from the third century BCE, the texts were later reused to make mummy envelopes called cartonnage. Most of these decorated cartonnages were destroyed as soon as they were discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, but about twenty of them remain in a part of the Jouguet collection that has not yet been inventoried.

The extraction of new papyri from the remaining cartonnages will be done without destroying the objects themselves, which will be restored and studied as such for the first time. This will bring new elements for the study of funerary practices in the early Ptolemaic period, a period that has long been neglected in Egyptological and art history studies. This will allow for a possible logic in the elimination of obsolete objects to be found.

See also

• Hypothesis notebook
• Exhibition "Living and dying in Egypt, from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra", Musée d'Aquitaine, Bordeaux EPHE news et press kit
• Cordis link