Elephantine papyri and ostraca

Elephantine Papyri and Ostraca consist of thousands of documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Aswan. The documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives. The dry soil of Upper Egypt preserved the documents. 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. The so-called "Passover Letter" of 419 BCE (discovered in 1907), which appears to give instructions for the observance of the Festival of Unleavened Bread (though Passover itself is not mentioned in the extant text), is in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin. The largest collection is in Berlin State Museums with texts in each of the languages. The mode of burial of the documents remains unknown, but they are thought to have been stored laterally and horizontally in close proximity to each other. The first known such papyri were bought by Giovanni Belzoni and Bernardino Drovetti in 1819 and three hieratic pieces were deposited at the new Museo Egizio in Turin in 1824.