The Wilbour Papyrus, named after the New York journalist who acquired it, Charles Edwin Wilbour, is the largest known non-funerary papyrus from Ancient Egypt. It is an administrative document which contains a survey of cultivatable lands in the late Ramesside Period of the New Kingdom of Egypt. The papyrus is 10 meters long and divided into two sections, text A and text B. Text A contains an extensive account of lands both privately and collectively owned. Text B is much shorter and contains and account of exclusively royal lands. The Wilbour Papyrus is a rare case of a well preserved look into the economic administration of Ancient Egypt. Egyptologists have been able to use it to produce a more complete analysis of the function of the Ancient Egyptian state.
History of the Papyrus
The Papyrus was created in 1140s BCE, the 4th year of the reign of Ramesses V. It may not be the original copy of the survey, instead it may have been created as an archival copy. Between its creation and discovery, most of the first section of the papyrus was lost due to decomposition. Charles Edwin Wilbour purchased seventeen papyri from a farmer when he visited the island of Elephantine near Aswan in 1893. Among these was the Wilbour Papyrus. When he died in a hotel in Paris in 1896, his belongings, which included the Wilbour, Brooklyn and Elephantine papyri, were put in storage by the hotel. When Wilbour's property was returned to his family, nearly half a century later, his widow donated the papyri to the Brooklyn Museum. The Wilbour Papyrus translated by for the Brooklyn Museum by Alan Gardiner in 1941. After it's translation there has been extensive writing done about the document by Egyptologists. As of 2023 it remains in storage at the museum, not on display.
Content and Purpose
The Wilbour Papyrus contains a large amount of data collected about cultivatable land. The area surveyed is not known with complete accuracy but it begins at The Faiyum and ends near Tihna (near Minya in the modern day), a distance of approximately 140 kilometers. Within the region surveyed, the papyrus contains data for only 4630 hectares of the approximately 150,000 hectares that would have been arable at the time. Text A is a ledger containing a list of names and occupations of the holders of plots of land. It is divided into 4 sections, the first of which has been lost to damage. Section 2 begins with “year 4, [second month of the Inundation-season], day 15 to day 20, making six days, assessment made by (unknown)”, "year 4" and "[inundation-season]" referring to the summer of the 4th year of the reign of Ramesses V, which has allowed Egyptologists to date the document to around 1145 BCE, but the specificity varies between 1140 BCE and 1150 BCE. Text B documents the cultivatable khato-land (translated to crown-land) of the Pharaoh in the surveyed region. It, unlike Text A, documents the grain yields of the land and where they were collected to.
Land Holders
The most numerous occupations of plot-holders in the document are priests (making up 10.6% of the population), soldiers (8.4%), ladies (11.1%), herdsmen (7.7%), stable-masters (17.7%), farmers (8.3%), and scribes (4.3%). The papyrus also lists a significant number of foreigners in its population. It mostly lists Libyans and Near-Easterners, it is possible they were foreign mercenaries who had descendants who settled on farmland in which they obtained for serving in the military. In some cases we see if the person who owned the land had deceased. It would then say the land is being cultivated by the sons or daughters.