Webinar: ‘The Graz Mummy Book’ – the oldest fragment of a manuscript in book form

‘The Graz Mummy Book’ – the oldest fragment of a manuscript in book form
Dr Theresa Zammit Lupi, Head of Conservation, Graz University Library, Austria

 Discovered in May 2023, the ‘Graz Mummy Book’ is the oldest fragment of a manuscript in book form that we know of and predates any known existing similar fragment by at least 400 years. This papyrus document has been part of the collection at the University of Graz since 1909. It was discovered during an excavation in the Egyptian necropolis of Hibeh, south of Fayum, and belongs to a collection of 52 papyri, some of which were used in the Ptolemaic period (305-30 BC) as cartonnage to wrap mummies. The Graz Mummy Book is a double sheet from a notebook onto which bills for beer and oil taxes had been recorded in Greek around 260 BC. Unlike a scroll, it is clearly in the format of a bifolio and has fragments of threads still attached to it that were used to seal the document. It was later recycled and turned into cartonnage for a mummy. This talk presents how this exciting discovery all happened by chance during routine work in the Conservation Department of Graz University Library and how the consequences of this find have changed the way we look at the history of the book.

Bio note

Theresa Zammit Lupi graduated in History of Art at the University of Malta in 1996. She then went on to study conservation in Florence and London and completed her PhD in 2009 at the University of the Arts London, specializing in the conservation of manuscripts. In 2017 she was awarded a research fellowship at Harvard University to study illuminated Renaissance manuscripts. Theresa has worked in Malta, Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Egypt and Ethiopia. She moved to Austria in 2021 where she joined the Special Collections team of Graz University Library where she heads the Conservation Department. In May 2023 Theresa discovered the oldest handwritten document in book form known as ‘The Mummy Book’ and has since been dedicating much of her time to research this precious item.

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