Exhibition Review | Elephantine: Island of the Millennia

As one of the few fora where academic knowledge is mediated to the general public, museum exhibitions are often revealing windows into the contemporary stakes and concerns that underpin scholarship. The stunning exhibition on Elephantine currently hosted at the James-Simon-Galerie and the Neues Museum in Berlin is no exception. The visitor is expertly guided through a sumptuous display of objects discovered, beginning in the late nineteenth century, on the famous island lying in the middle of the Nile in Upper Egypt. The showcased materials – some pristinely preserved, others incomplete but no less illuminating – include nearly a dozen scripts in as many languages, including Hieroglyphics, Hieratic, Demotic, Coptic, Aramaic, Greek, Syriac, Arabic, and even Middle Persian, and composed by a dizzying array of social groups, from Egyptians to Judeans/Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Though the broad chronological scope of the exhibition is one of its advertised attractions, the picture that emerges of this sundry material is decidedly synchronic. The official website celebrates “4,000 years of unbroken cultural history” where “a whole range of languages, cultures and religions existed side by side.” A handsome catalogue with essays and images of the artifacts can be purchased at the museum gift shop.

The gathered artifacts “tell stories of pluralism, family, religion, trade, and medicine,” and of “the diversity of social life” and “of the religious beliefs of the people who lived there.” Certain objects undoubtedly underscore the embeddedness, interactions, and hybridity of groups on the island in ways that defy modern expectations that religious groups and their traditions remain hermetically sealed and independent from one another. Some of the most spectacular evidence of these complex interconnections include Papyrus Amherst 63, an Aramaic text in Demotic script “syncretistically” invoking deities like Horus and Adonai, and a fragmentary ostracon in which a “Judeo-Aramaean” named Gaddul blesses (ברכתכ) another, Micaiah, by “Yaho and Khnum ([ולחנ] ליהה), a typical Judean and Egyptian deity respectively.

If the tacit contemporary implications of this image of four thousand years of coexistence seem apparent, the official exhibition description leaves nothing to doubt: “Elephantine is a unique model of historical diversity that can teach us lessons for the present and the future.” The exhibition itself embodies the possibilities of international cross-cultural collaboration; it emerged out of a European Research Grant (ERC) in conjunction with the Musée du Louvre and the Brooklyn Museum and the Egyptian Ministry for Tourism and Antiquities, and it solicited perspectives from the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a collective marking “a decade of successful German-Arab research collaborations and scholarly diplomacy.” The diversity of communities and languages at Elephantine is paralleled by the different contributing bodies as well as the three languages used for the exhibition descriptions – first Arabic, then bolded German, and then English. The millennia of linguistic and cultural pluralism and diversity at Elephantine lives on in this exhibition held in its honor.

It is always tempting to see ourselves in our subjects and sources, and to derive lessons from the past. But in this case, the understandable impulse to stress pluralism and diversity in the service of worthy contemporary political programs comes at the expense of the historical record, and the lived experiences of the individuals and communities the exhibition is ostensibly intended to portray. Though diverse communities undoubtedly lived and mingled there, Elephantine was also a site of major inter- and intra-group friction and violence; indeed, it served as a military garrison for much of its history, hardly an irenic space. In the very same display case housing the Aramaeo-Judean invocation of both Yaho and Khnum sits a far lengthier and well-known papyrus (Pap. Berlin P. 13495) in which the Judean community on the island petitioned the Persian governor of Judea for the right to rebuild their temple to Yaho after it was destroyed by the Egyptian priests of Khnum in the late fifth century BCE. The precise cause of the violence is a subject of debate, but other papyri confirm that it was undoubtedly the culmination of a period of strife and turmoil, filled with mutual recriminations, arrests and search warrants, and still more violence between Judeans and Egyptians (A3.8). Bereaved at the destruction of their temple, the Judeans first reach out to fellow Judeans, and even the high priest, in Jerusalem, but their pleas fell on deaf ears, perhaps because the Jews in Jerusalem looked askance at the request to rebuild a competing cultic center to their deity. As a last resort, the Judeans go over the head of the vindictive local Persian officials and instead petition the Persian governor in Judea.

This episode encapsulates how the proximity of these communities to each other might in fact have provoked tension, unrest, and eventually, devastation. Indeed, the function of Elephantine as a trading hub, evidenced in the exhibition by impressive displays of goods from across the Mediterranean, was itself a cause of friction, pitting Judean merchants against Egyptians. Clashes ensued.[1] None of these complex social dynamics are identified in the exhibition; curiously, unlike some of the other objects on display, no translation of the “temple petition” was available on the otherwise remarkable handheld digital platform designed for the exhibition. Instead, the papyrus receives the highly sterile description: “Aramaic Letter with Request from the Aramaeo-Jewish community of Elephantine to the Persian Governor in Judea to rebuild the Temple of Jahu.” A visitor would be forgiven for believing that the temple simply collapsed on its own. In his sprawling diachronic account of “anti-Judaism,” David Nirenberg points to this episode at Elephantine as a kind of origin moment for the development of an anti-Jewish tradition in antiquity.[2] Whether or not one accepts Nirenberg’s suggestion, the fact that a leading scholar could make it should be enough to warrant an honest description of the papyrus’ content, especially in Berlin of all places.

This conflictual account of the late-fifth-century BCE skirmish between Judeans and Egyptians could be reproduced for the other groups who lived on the island over the lengthy period of its occupation. A focus on the geographic co-habitation of Christians, Muslims, and Persians ignores that their presence on the island was the result of major conquests and periods of violence, and that they too often had highly contentious relationships. In fact, a monastic settlement was built at the heart of the temple complex of Khnum, almost certainly in order to signify the supersession of pagan cults by Christianity, like the two churches built over the temple of Isis in the nearby island settlement of Philae.[3] Yet the exhibition’s sign concerning “Religions and Faith” at Elephantine simply notes the “simultaneity” of these groups and the many gods worshipped there: “it was therefore quite possible to adopt a different faith or religion,” a change of heart that apparently occurred freely, outside of power disparities, and without consequence to other groups on or around the island.

To be sure, a one-sided narrative of uninterrupted violence and destruction is neither more accurate nor preferable to this upbeat alternative. But the power of coexistence at Elephantine, of exchange and contact, derives precisely from the fact that it occurred in the shadow of tension, distrust, and disdain. Indeed, acknowledging the “simultaneity” of both amity and enmity raises critical questions about the motivations for and the actors’ understanding of the two. Any attempt to compartmentalize fails to capture how intergroup contact often occurs as a result and in the service of tension, while violence can serve to bring otherwise opposed groups together in a fight against common enemies. Treating contact and exchange as ends in themselves misses the instrumental reasons that might motivate them.

The exhibition’s idealized portrayal of the past participates in a broader trajectory in the study of the ancient world that is increasingly skittish around descriptions of ancient intergroup violence. Texts describing episodes of violence, especially between Jews and Christians, are now regularly treated first and foremost as “representation,” images crafted by the author to promote their own agenda, mainly to articulate impermeable boundaries between groups. The existence of contact and exchange, from single cases of textual parallels to joint guilds of incantation writers, is taken by some as the norm relative to which violence was both rare and indeed a reactionary response. These trends are especially pronounced in the case of Jewish Studies. Salo Baron famously critiqued the prevalence of “lachrymose” approaches to the Jewish past that render it, in Thomas Hobbes’ quip, “poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” an unending series of persecutions and violence. But a critique of an overemphasis on the lachrymose has rendered a focus on the brutish passé. Anti-lachrymose histories now proliferate, emphasizing Jewish cultural flourishing by stressing contact and exchange with their neighbors, even their overlords, without reckoning with countervailing forces and the greater context that supplies these moments with texture. Periodically, some dissenters have registered their concern with this growing consensus, calling for “neobaronian” or “neolachrymose” approaches that grapple with the complex interplay between conflict and coexistence. I want to throw my lot in with this group, not in order to insist that there was always a kind of hardened distinction, for instance, between Jews and Christians, nor to claim that the boundary between these groups was static and unchanging. I do, however, wish to draw attention to how violence and forms of connectivity and exchange cannot be so easily disentangled.

But equally, my argument is that such an unrealistic and utopian picture of the past – and its presumed relevance for the present – makes for bad contemporary politics. The desire to construct harmonious pasts selectively highlights only those aspects of ancient identities and experiences that align with current ideals, conveniently omitting the less contemporarily palatable. This selective narrative fosters the belief that coexistence is inherent and natural, rather than a hard-fought process. More nuanced and realistic accounts of the past remind us that the value we place on coexistence, though vital, is neither universal nor timeless. It has always required effort and struggle. To create better futures, we must constantly contend with the competing forces that shape our world, just as they shaped the lives of the inhabitants of Elephantine for well over a millennium.

Simcha Gross is a Founding Editor of the Ancient Jew Review, and Assistant Professor of Rabbinics in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Pennsylvania.

[1] Karel van der Toorn, “Previously, at Elephantine,” JAOS 138 (2018), 255-270.

[2] David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).

[3] Leslie S.B. MacCoull, “Christianity at Syene/Elephantine/Philae,” The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 27 (1990), 151-162.