The 2019 Tipton Lecture in Religious Studies will comprise a mini-colloquium featuring Roberta Mazza (U. of Manchester, Tipton Professor) and Anna Uhlig (Classics, UC Davis). It will be held at the SB Mission Archive Library.
From the poetry of Sappho to the New Testament, texts written on papyrus have been preserved for millennia by arid conditions in Egypt, excavated, and collected in archives. This timely colloquium examines the legal and ethical problems surrounding these papyrological archives. Roberta Mazza will tell the story of how ancient papyri of unknown provenance were acquired by the Museum of the Bible and are now at the center of a scandal and police investigation. Anna Uhlig will discuss how Egyptian mummies have been destroyed in the quest to “recover” ancient texts and how we can use the Tebtunis archive at UC Berkeley to honor the “missing mummies” lost to us in the name of scholarship.
