Grain Transport in the Ramesside Era : Papyrus Baldwin and Papyrus Amiens

This catalogue is the definitive publication of a mid-20th Dynasty papyrus that seems to have been discovered in the necropolis at Assiut in the early 1880s.

The bottom half is in the British Museum (P. BM. EA 10061) while the top half (previously published by Alan Gardiner in Ramesside Administrative Documents (Oxford 1948) is in the Amiens Museum (Inv.

M.P. 88.3.5). The two halves were identified as coming from the same roll by Professor Janssen in 1994, and he here presents a full hieroglyphic transcription, translation and commentary of the texts.

The papyrus contains a mid-20th Dynasty record of grain transport, with information about a fleet of twenty-one cargo ships belonging to the Domain of Amun.

The handwriting is very difficult, being written at speed with extremely abbreviated signs, and the difficulties are compounded by the presence of many place names that are obscure because the papyrus records information about a region otherwise little known from documents.