Jacco Dieleman is Associate Professor of Egyptology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his training in Egyptology and Comparative Literature at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and the University of Würzburg in Germany. He received his PhD from the University of Leiden in 2003 on a dissertation on the nature and function of bilingualism and translation in two related magic handbooks from Roman Egypt. He has been teaching Egyptology at UCLA since 2003. He was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World of New York University during the academic year 2010-11.
Personalized ritual papyri as material figurations of the singular and the typical in ancient Egypt
The aim of this research project is to study how standard (typical) temple rituals performed in the cult of Osiris, god of the dead, could be personalized for private consumption (singular) in ancient Egypt. The study will focus on one particular figuration of this process: the so-called »Artemis Liturgical Papyrus.« This manuscript dates to the late Ptolemaic or early Roman period and preserves a unique collection of temple rituals adapted and inscribed for the burial of a private female named »Artemis, daughter of Herais« (these Greek names are written in Egyptian characters throughout the manuscript). The manuscript is particularly well suited to study the tension between the exemplary/typical and the singular, because it concerns a shift in ontology (from god to human), gender (from male deity to woman), ethnicity (from Egyptian to Greek), and institutional (from state temple to private life). Although the manuscript cannot be considered an autobiography in the regular sense of the word, it does represent a culture’s attempt to capture an individual’s life through death.
