10/08/2025 | Research, English

Famous pieces and unique insights

University of Cologne’s papyrus collection is made up of approximately 20,000 small fragments from ancient Egypt.

Ein Regal, gefüllt mit verschiiedenen Papieren

The University of Cologne’s papyrus collection is impressive due to its size alone. It is made up of approximately 20,000 of the small fragments, kept at the University’s Department of Classics. The texts offer a direct and undiluted depiction of daily life in ancient Egypt – from the development of gender roles to the handling of pets.

By Eva Schissler

In an air-conditioned room in the Arts and Humanities Building at the University of Cologne, Charikleia Armoni opens a wooden cabinet and pulls out a perspex box. Behind the acrylic panes is an Egyptian mummy mask. The remnants of colour give some idea of how the object was once magnificently painted. However, the mask is not part of the Cologne Papyrus Collection simply because it is beautiful. On closer inspection, something else emerges: characters in the deeper layers that are not clearly recognizable.

Ägyptische Mumienmaske aus Papyrus — An Egyptian mummy mask made from papyri

Portraitfoto — The curator of the Cologne papyrus collection, Charikleia Armoni, was introduced to everyday ancient Greek through the study of papyri

The mask is made from many small cuttings of papyrus, a kind of antique papier-mâché. “Paper was not mass produced back then. Embalmers travelled the country and bought up text archives as waste paper. This ‘raw material’ was then used for mummification,” says Armoni. The professor of papyrology and curator of the Cologne Papyrus Collection is keen to find out what is written on these papyri. However, she has not yet found a way to access the inner layers. She is hoping for a technical solution to penetrate the mask without having to destroy it.

The papyrus collection at the University of Cologne comprises approximately 20,000 artefacts. Researchers at the Department of Classics decipher, translate and comment on the individual pieces. Once this exploratory work and indexing has been done, subsequent historical or linguistic analyses can be carried out. In addition to papyri, the collection also contains other “data carriers”, such as pottery shards. In Germany, only the Egyptian Museum in Berlin and the University of Heidelberg have bigger collections, which makes Cologne’s papyri one of the largest and most important collections in the world.

Emerging from the Second World War

The majority of the collection was created in the 1950s and 60s. In the post-war period, the large museum collection in Berlin was damaged and barely accessible. The Latin scholar and two-time university rector Josef Kroll and the Greek scholar Reinhold Merkelbach wanted students to have access to papyrology again in the Federal Republic of Germany, and brought a large number of important items to Cologne over the next few decades. In the 1970s, the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Humanities provided further funding for the acquisition of papyri. As a result, the collection grew and is now home to a great number of outstanding objects.

The most famous piece: the Mani Code

The “smallest book of antiquity” is also the only surviving edition of the religious book of the Manichaeans in Greek. It dates from the 5th century CE. The text contains the life story of “little Mani”, the founder of the religion who drew on Jesus as well as the Buddha and Zarathustra in his teachings.

As a world religion around the Mediterranean, Manichaeism was a serious competitor to early Christianity. When the Roman Empire stopped persecuting the Christians from 313 onwards, they in turn pushed the Manichaeans back along the Silk Road to the north of China. Today, the religion no longer exists.

The researchers in Cologne have been asking themselves why the book so small, measuring no more than 3.5 by 4.5 centimetres. One theory is that the owner could still carry such a small book about their person at a time when the religious community was already being persecuted. Another is that they may have carried it with them as a talisman, as the writing is far too small to be read with the naked eye.

Despite the tiny font, the letters are very even and neat. It is unclear how this was achieved, as an instrument such as the magnifying glass was not developed until later.

In the post-war period, papyri were still freely available in antiquarian bookshops. In 1973, however, Egypt accepted the 1970 UNESCO convention against the illicit export of cultural property. This prevented the country from losing further valuable historical artefacts. Since then, every dealer has had to prove that the papyrus offered for sale had already been exported from Egypt before the convention came into force. Armoni believes this is completely justified: “The illegal trade in artefacts robs the countries of origin of their cultural assets. And the unregulated sale of papyri makes it impossible to trace the exact location where many objects were found. That way, valuable information is lost.”
A unique way to access the history of daily life

Most of the papyri come from the Egyptian interior and from a period that begins with Ptolemaic rule. Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BCE. After his early death and as a result of the Diadochi Wars, his general Ptolemy I came to power and founded a dynasty. Thus began the Macedonian-Greek era in Egypt, and the Hellenic culture and the Greek language arrived with it. When the Romans took over, the new rulers largely retained this official language. This explains why almost all the papyri in the Cologne collection are written in ancient Greek. Greco-Roman rule, which was repeatedly challenged by Egyptian uprisings and civil wars, came to an end in the 8th century with the Arab conquest.

Papyri were solely been preserved inland due to climatic conditions: only there was it dry enough. In Alexandria, the first megacity of antiquity, this kind of treasure was lost due to the humid maritime climate. The papyri are a valuable – often the only – form of access to everyday life in Greco-Roman antiquity. Armoni: “Papyrology can tell us, for example, how a church was organized in early Christianity. There are no known literary texts from the time which address this question because their authors did not deem it important enough to record these things for posterity.

This value of the papyri was first recognized by classical scholars in the nineteenth century. The first discoveries revealed a great deal of information, but often they could only be deciphered by way of international co-operation. While one institution possessed a fragment, another may have had a further piece that completed the text and disclosed its contents. This is how the amiticia papyrologorum, the friendship of papyrologists, came into being. “Without it, nothing works,” says Charikleia Armoni.

Good news

In this private letter from the 3rd century BCE, a soldier congratulates a family he knows on the birth of a child. The terminology is particularly interesting: the author uses the ancient Greek term “evangelion”, or “good news”. The fact that this word was used for such an occasion three centuries before the birth of Christ was unknown until this discovery.

What is even more remarkable is that the child was a girl. In Greek culture, the birth of a girl was not seen as an occasion to be overjoyed about. A woman could not testify in court or sign a contract without the permission of her “kyrios” (her “owner”, a male family member). In Egyptian society, however, women enjoyed higher status and more freedom, being entitled to conclude transactions themselves.

The soldier who wrote the letter was Greek. The papyrus shows that Egyptian gender relations obviously had an influence on Greek culture in Ptolemaic Egypt. He therefore also saw the birth of a girl as a joyful event – as an “evangelion”.

As most of the texts were not written with posterity in mind, they paint an authentic picture of everyday life. They reveal how public authorities functioned, what means the Greek occupiers used to put down popular uprisings, or that an astonishing number of people in Ptolemaic Egypt could read and enjoyed reading exciting ‘novels’ - much like we do today. ”I'm particularly interested in the documentary texts,” says Armoni. As a Greek scholar, she had studied Sophocles and other ‘lofty’ texts from antiquity during her early career. The Cologne papyrus collection opened up a whole new world for her. “Just getting to know the ancient Greek everyday language was a revelation, because people didn’t speak the way Plato wrote.”

These documentary texts, which are particularly valuable for historical research, encompass letters on papyrus or pottery fragments that relate to the details of administrative life and show how an ancient state was organized. In order to investigate these questions in detail, the German Research Foundation is currently funding the long-term project CPAP (Corpus of Greek papyrus texts with administrative content from Ptolemaic Egypt) over twelve years, in which papyrologists from the Universities of Cologne and Halle-Wittenberg are collaborating.

Preserving the collection – an ongoing task

Today, the Cologne papyrus collection is completely digitized. This means that these historical resources can be viewed by researchers worldwide. Nevertheless, the physical objects are irreplaceable for Charikleia Armoni. With so many artefacts, however, it is not easy to preserve the items in the collection. A restorer would have to look after the pieces on a permanent basis. The papyrologist is particularly proud of one thing: “In Cologne, the papyri are protected behind glass or perspex panes but the students can actually hold them in their hands. That’s what is special about our institution here in Cologne, you can’t do that everywhere.”

Thanks to digitalization, the content is not in danger of being lost. But the ancient artefacts have survived two thousand years and more. They deserve a little special treatment too.

Claiming innocence

In the “Kitten Papyrus” from 202 BCE, an Egyptian priest describes a bitter loss: he had four little kittens in his house, which he loved very much and had raised with milk. But one day a tomcat stormed into the yard, dragged the kittens onto the street and killed them.
The form this document takes is that of a petition, an official submission to state authorities. But why is this priest making such a report, and why should the police be interested in the incident?

As the personification of the goddess Bastet, the feline daughter of the sun god Re, cats were held to be sacred in ancient Egypt. Anyone who killed cats had to fear being dealt a severe punishment. The priest was afraid that someone might slander him and tried to protect himself by giving his own account of the incident.

Back