Papyrus Anastasi VI
Papyrus Anastasi VI preserves a late Nineteenth Dynasty model border report in which Egyptian officials allow Shasu groups associated with Edom through the Tjeku frontier to water their livestock, illuminating managed mobility without identifying the travelers as Israelites.
- Artifact date
- Ancient Near Eastern or Second Temple period; see cited catalog
- Findspot
- See cited institutional catalog
What archaeologists can actually examine
The papyrus is a Late Egyptian miscellany containing model letters and reports used within scribal culture. Lines 51–61 describe completion of the admission of Shasu clans “of Edom” through a fortress of Merneptah in Tjeku to the pools of Per-Atum, so that the people and their herds might live. The report records a practical frontier decision: Egyptian officials monitored mobile pastoralists, named their regional association, controlled a gate, and granted access to water under pharaonic authority. It is an external Egyptian reference to Edom and to regulated movement in the eastern Delta, not a narrative of Israel’s exodus or wilderness journey.
Edom appears in an Egyptian report
The text associates incoming Shasu clans with Edom, providing an external late Nineteenth Dynasty geographical designation.
Frontier passage was recorded
An official reports admitting mobile groups through a named fortress in Tjeku under the authority of Pharaoh.
Water was the stated necessity
Access to the pools of Per-Atum was granted specifically to preserve the travelers and their livestock.
The manuscript is pedagogical
The report survives within a miscellany of model correspondence, so genre must qualify historical reconstruction.
Shasu are not automatically Israelites
Egyptian terminology describes mobile pastoral populations and does not identify the admitted group with Moses or Yahweh worship.
Follow the evidence from discovery to debate
Move through the find in a deliberate order: establish its provenance, examine the surviving object, place it in time, and then weigh the scholarly interpretation.
How the find came to light
Giovanni Anastasi, an Armenian-born antiquities dealer and Swedish-Norwegian consul in Alexandria, assembled the papyrus in Egypt before the British Museum purchased it in 1839. Its original excavation place is unrecorded, a common limitation of early collections. The roll was mounted in separate framed sheets, catalogued as EA 10245, and published through nineteenth-century facsimiles before Alan Gardiner and Ricardo Caminos produced standard editions of the Late Egyptian miscellanies. Sheet 3 contains the border report. Because the text belongs to a copied anthology rather than a recovered frontier archive, scholars distinguish the date of the manuscript from the administrative situation that its model composition represents.
What you are looking at
EA 10245 is a hieratic papyrus roll written in black ink and now preserved in several framed sections. Sheet 3 contains columns with a complaint letter followed by lines 51–61, the report about temporary passage of Bedouin or Shasu groups, and then another administrative report. Hieratic is the cursive script used by trained Egyptian scribes, and the language belongs to the Late Egyptian instructional miscellanies. Abrasion, losses, mounting, and older editorial conventions affect individual readings, but the principal place names and pastoral purpose are clear in standard editions. The object is therefore both an ancient manuscript and evidence for how apprentice scribes learned official correspondence.
Where it belongs in history
The papyrus is dated by its opening formula to the reign of Seti II, roughly 1200 BCE, near the close of Egypt’s Nineteenth Dynasty. The report names a fortress of Merneptah, showing that its imagined or copied administrative setting belongs after that king’s accession. Tjeku and Per-Atum lay within Egypt’s eastern Delta frontier system, a zone of forts, canals, pools, and routes toward Sinai. Egyptian texts use Shasu as a flexible designation for mobile pastoral populations rather than one ethnic nation. The phrase translated “of Edom” is important, but debate continues over whether it refers to southern Transjordan, a broader desert toponym, or a group then active nearer northern Sinai.
Consensus, questions, and debate
Egyptologists agree on the papyrus’s place among Late Egyptian miscellanies and on the general sense of the border report. Discussion centers on genre and geography. A model letter may preserve a realistic report, an adapted archival form, or a pedagogical composition; its value does not require that the named movement happened exactly as copied. The expression conventionally rendered “Shasu of Edom” has often been recruited into biblical chronologies, but recent study warns that nothing in the passage securely locates this Edom in southern Transjordan. Scholars also reject merging all Shasu references into one ethnicity. The document is strongest as evidence for Egyptian categories and frontier practice around 1200 BCE.
The biblical record beside the artifact
Numbers 20:14–21 portrays Israel asking Edom for passage along a controlled route and promising not to use fields, vineyards, or wells; Edom refuses and appears with armed force. Deuteronomy 2:1–8 likewise remembers movement near Seir and commands respect for Edomite territory and purchased food and water. Papyrus Anastasi VI describes a different direction of travel and a different authority, yet it independently shows why passage, border permission, livestock, and water were inseparable political questions for mobile groups. Its use of Edom supplies geographical context. It does not identify the Shasu as Israel, Moses’s company, or worshipers of Yahweh.
Numbers 20:14–21
14¶ And Moses sent messengers from Kadesh unto the king of Edom, Thus saith thy brother Israel, Thou knowest all the travail that hath befallen us:
15How our fathers went down into Egypt, and we have dwelt in Egypt a long time; and the Egyptians vexed us, and our fathers:
16And when we cried unto the LORD, he heard our voice, and sent an angel, and hath brought us forth out of Egypt: and, behold, we [are] in Kadesh, a city in the uttermost of thy border:
17Let us pass, I pray thee, through thy country: we will not pass through the fields, or through the vineyards, neither will we drink [of] the water of the wells: we will go by the king’s [high] way, we will not turn to the right hand nor to the left, until we have passed thy borders.
18And Edom said unto him, Thou shalt not pass by me, lest I come out against thee with the sword.
19And the children of Israel said unto him, We will go by the high way: and if I and my cattle drink of thy water, then I will pay for it: I will only, without [doing] any thing [else], go through on my feet.
20And he said, Thou shalt not go through. And Edom came out against him with much people, and with a strong hand.
21Thus Edom refused to give Israel passage through his border: wherefore Israel turned away from him.
A responsible historical conclusion
This modest report reveals realities that monumental inscriptions usually omit. Human survival at an imperial frontier depended on an official’s decision to open a gate and permit herds to reach water. The text joins geography, ecology, administration, and mobility in one short notice, making the practical stakes of biblical travel narratives easier to see. It also preserves the name Edom in an Egyptian source near the transition from the Late Bronze to Iron Age. Responsible use lets the papyrus enrich the world behind Numbers and Deuteronomy while resisting a tempting identity equation. Its evidentiary power lies in context—how borders worked—not in supplying missing characters from Exodus.
Authoritative sources
Institutional catalogs, excavation reports, and academic publications let you examine the evidence beyond this summary.
Papyrus Anastasi VI, Sheet 3 (EA10245,3)
British MuseumHolding-museum catalog for the exact sheet containing lines 51–61, with material, genre, collection history, and standard publication references.
pAnastasi VI = pBM EA 10245 (Miscellanies)
Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae, Berlin-Brandenburg and Saxon AcademiesAuthoritative Egyptological corpus record dating the manuscript to Seti II and identifying lines 51–61 as the report on Bedouin passage.
Les deux Édoms de l’âge du bronze récent
Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina Institutional RepositoryFocused scholarly study of the Papyrus Anastasi VI Edom reference and the major geographical limits on locating it in southern Transjordan.
Papyrus Anastasi VI: Report on Temporary Immigration of Bedouin
British Museum image and catalog serviceRecord for the exact manuscript detail, identifying the content sequence and the temporary-immigration report on sheet 3.