Description

A pioneering Egyptologist, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) excavated over fifty sites and trained a generation of archaeologists. A great many of his publications have been reissued in this series. In the 1890s, the Irish scholar Sir John Pentland Mahaffy (1839-1919) took the lead on the considerable task of cataloguing, transcribing and commenting on the Greek papyri found by Petrie in mummy cartonnage on recent digs in Egypt. This three-volume collection is the result of his labours. The texts, comprising private correspondence, legal records, petitions and many other types of document, reveal a great deal about life in Egypt in the third century BCE. Volume 1, first published in 1891, contains thirty autotype reproductions of key examples, as well as a detailed introduction on palaeography and the circumstances surrounding the discovery of some of the papyri.