The «Theban library» and the collections of Giovanni Anastasi

A large share of the magical papyri now held in European museums passed through the hands of a single man. Giovanni Anastasi, a merchant of Greek-Armenian origin working in Alexandria, was consul general of Sweden and Norway in Egypt in the first half of the nineteenth century. At a time when excavation was often little more than plunder, he gathered thousands of ancient objects and sold them on to the great museums of the continent, feeding the young science of Egyptology.

The sales to Leiden, London and Paris

Anastasi's first large collection was bought in 1828 by the Dutch state and entered the museum of antiquities in Leiden. It included Greek and demotic papyri of magical and alchemical content, among them the so-called Leiden Papyrus X. A second collection was bought by the British Museum in 1839. After the consul's death in 1857, what remained was dispersed at an auction in Paris, where the Bibliothèque nationale secured the great magical codex now known as PGM IV.

Anastasi also gave some papyri to the Swedish Academy of Letters in Stockholm. Among them was the Stockholm Papyrus, a collection of technical recipes on dyeing textiles, working metals and imitating precious stones. Together with Leiden Papyrus X, it is considered one of the oldest documents for the history of practical chemistry and alchemy.

The hypothesis of a single library

Sources of the time indicate that many of these papyri came from the area of Thebes, modern Luxor. This gave rise to the hypothesis, debated by scholars, that they belonged to a single archive: the library of one or more ritual specialists, perhaps buried with its owner in a tomb. Hence the expressions «Theban library» or «Theban magical library».

The hypothesis rests on similarities of handwriting, format and content, and on the coherent set of texts: Greek magical handbooks, demotic texts with Old Coptic glosses, treatises on metallurgical technique. Excavation data, however, are lacking, and reports of provenance are indirect. Scholars regard it as a plausible reconstruction, not a proven fact.

A culture of bilingual scribes

If the hypothesis is correct, the Theban library bears witness to a precise milieu. Its owners knew Greek and demotic, could read the signs of the old Egyptian script, copied texts of different origin and annotated them. They were probably linked to the world of the temples, which in the third and fourth centuries AD was losing resources and prestige. The papyri thus preserve the last phase of Egyptian priestly culture.

The clearest case is the London-Leiden Magical Papyrus, written in demotic and divided between two museums. Only by comparing the two fragments did scholars understand that they belonged to the same roll. Episodes like this show how much the dispersal of collections complicated the work of scholars, forced to reconstruct on paper units that the antiquities trade had separated.

The history of the Anastasi collections is a reminder of how much our knowledge of ancient texts depends on modern episodes of trade and diplomacy. What we read today in critical editions has passed through merchants, consuls, auctions and catalogues. Reconstructing that path is an integral part of the history of manuscripts, because every division between museums has made it harder to understand what once belonged together.