This ME Scripta project examines the female owners of Ptolemaic Book of the Dead manuscripts preserved in the Museo Egizio. These papyri, produced many centuries after the New Kingdom, show how funerary traditions were adapted in a changing religious and political landscape – and how women continued to claim a place in the afterlife through personalised texts and images.
The focus lies on all Book of the Dead manuscripts of mainly Ptolemaic date that can be identified as belonging to women. Personal names, titles and kinship terms are systematically recorded and analysed together with the composition of the papyri: which spells are selected or omitted, how the owner appears in the vignettes, and how style, language and writing reflect regional workshops and local preferences.
Through this material, the project asks:
By integrating textual, prosopographical and iconographical evidence, the project turns the Ptolemaic Books of the Dead in Turin into a key source for women’s religious agency and social status in late pharaonic Egypt, and provides a basis for future comparative studies of female owners in other museum collections.
