Temples were the main centers of native erudition and culture, which were practiced in the so-called ‘‘House of Life.’’ In Edfu and Philai some rooms where papyrus rolls were stored can still be identified, thanks to the hieroglyphic inscriptions (Holbl 2004: 56-9). The temple libraries of Tebtunis and Soknopaiou Nesos are partially preserved and offer a glimpse of priestly scholarship, with its inextricable mixture of religion and science. Ancient religious texts in the classical language were copied in Hieratic and Demotic scripts, and their vocabulary was listed in onomastica, which developed into encyclopedias of native knowledge (Osing 1998). These books were used as lexica for drawing up the sacred hieroglyphic texts on temple walls: though the syntax of the ritual texts is repetitive and basic, their vocabulary is extremely diversified, as scribes looked up synonyms in their onomastica. Handbooks for the organization of the temple, both its ideal architecture, the management structure of the priestly staff, and the liturgic rituals, are preserved in many copies, in Hieratic and Demotic (Quack 2000). Religious geography is found in the Book of the Fayum, which includes a kind of map in the form of a goddess, with ancient crocodile shrines situated on both sides of the Bahr Yusuf (Beinlich 1991).
Knowledge about the time and the height of the Nile inundation was gained from the Nilometers along the Nile; the rising of the waters first visible in Elephantine could be transmitted by fire signals to the capital in a single night. It was also measured in the temples by means of a well. Thus good and bad floods could be predicted from the start of the agricultural year; but at the same time the rising of the waters was explained by divine intervention. Thus Ptolemy X continued the traditional role of the Pharaoh by performing the sollemne sacrum at the so-called sources of the Nile in the First Cataract at Elephantine (OGIS I 168 = O. Thebes-Syene 244 ll.9-10). Precise astronomical observations are inextricably mixed up with astrological predictions of good and bad days in the treatises on the heavenly bodies (e. g. Hughes 1986) and in the onomastica. They were applied in the astronomical ceilings of several Graeco-Roman temples and in horoscopes, which are a new phenomenon of the Roman Period (Neugebauer and Parker 1969; Cauville 1997). The user-friendly Egyptian calendar of 12 months of 30 days with 5 festival days at the end of the year was also taken over by the Greeks; a minor correction, adding an extra day every four years, was first proposed in 237 bc (OGIS I 56 ll.37-47) and eventually put into practice by Augustus in 30 bc. Native judges (laokritai) rendered justice at the gate of the temple on the basis of traditional Egyptian laws, which were codified, amongst others, by Pharaoh Busiris and the Persian king Darius (Quaegebeur 1981). Some sections are preserved in Demotic papyri (e. g. P. Mattha and P. Zauzich 41 and 42), and a Greek translation was still in use during the second half of the second century AD (P. Oxy. 46 3285 Vo.).
World History
