Inventing History: Narrative Compositions in Demotic and Biblical Literature
Start: October 2022
Demotic Literature and texts of the Hebrew Bible composed in the Persian and Hellenistic periods witness an interaction of learned scribes with their own national pasts in different genres. This is obvious in historiographic texts, but also readily detectable in narrative literature. Both are typically set in the (sometimes distant) past but are told through the lens of, and sometimes with a (political) message for, their contemporary contexts. Historiographic texts like the Demotic Chronicle and the biblical book of Chronicles structure and interpret the national past, especially kings and dynasties, and sometimes evaluate and critique these indigenous rulers. In narrative literature, novellas were a prominent genre in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, and were not only set in the past but often in a context of compromised national rule or outright foreign rule. Examples include The Battle for the Prebend of Amun (Papyrus Spiegelberg) and the book of Esther. Nevertheless, rulers are presented in different ways, sometimes as enemies, other times as allies. In this subproject, these literary corpora will be subjected to detailed philological analysis and also considered with a systematic perspective, with a goal of understanding how scribal elites in Egypt and "Israel" composed complex narrative literature that reflected an awakening of national self-reflection under the horizon of Persian and Hellenistic rule.
Research Team:
José Rafael Saade (1.1)
Dr. Joseph Cross (1.2)
Lilian Uhlig (1.3)