History of the Ancient Near East · Part 22 · Babylon and Persia · B2
Elephantine
Part 22 of History of the Ancient Near East: on an island at the southern border of Egypt, Judean soldiers served the king of Persia, married Egyptians and Arameans, signed contracts, and worshipped their god in his own temple, next door to the temple of a ram god. Then, in 410 BCE, the neighbours destroyed it. The past perfect continuous (they had been living there for a century) and reported speech (they complained that…, asked whether…), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, we travel up the Nile, almost a thousand kilometres, to the first cataract, and four hundred years back, to an island called Elephantine.
Soldiers and their families, for generations. And they had a temple, with sacrifices, outside Jerusalem.
Like the temple of Onias at Leontopolis, here in Egypt, today. Our scholars in Jerusalem do not approve of it either.
Elephantine is an island in the Nile at Aswan, at the old southern border of Egypt. Under the Persian empire, it had a garrison of soldiers from many peoples, including Judeans and Arameans. They spoke and wrote Aramaic, the official language of the empire. Their letters, contracts and lists were written on papyrus and pieces of pottery, and many were found from the 1890s onwards.
The Judeans of Elephantine had a temple of YHW, as they wrote the name of their god, with sacrifices, priests and an altar. They said it had already been standing when Cambyses conquered Egypt in 525 BCE. Next to it stood the temple of Khnum, the ram-headed Egyptian god of the cataract.
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