Amherst papyri
ancient papyrus collection
The Amherst papyri are a collection of ancient papyri now mostly kept in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. They were acquired by John Pierpont Morgan in 1912. They are named for Lord Amherst of Hackney, who began assembling the collection in the 1860s through purchases from R. T. Lieder and John Lee. He kept them at Didlington Hall in Norfolk.
The collection includes or included 42 papyri in Egyptian written in hieroglyphic or hieratic script; 84 in Coptic, of which only 37 were ever catalogued, the rest being described as "very decayed, powdery and worthless"; and 237 mainly in Demotic Egyptian and Greek, but including a few in Coptic, Arabic and Latin.
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This entry incorporates text from “Amherst papyri” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.