The oldest text in the collection is around 4,000 years old and comes from the Papyrus Hauniensis Collection, which was also acquired with funds from the Carlsberg Foundation and was merged with the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection in 2010. As a whole, the material provides rare insight into the scholarly culture associated with the Egyptian temples, where religious, scientific and administrative activities took place.

The collection was founded during the 1930s by the Egyptologist Hans Ostenfeld Lange (1863–1943) with funding from the Carlsberg Foundation. Lange was part of an international research network based in Berlin. Here the Egyptologist Adolf Erman (1854–1937) was the head of the so-called Berlin School, which from the 1880s until World War I set the standard for the modern study of ancient Egypt.

This was the golden era of Egyptology, when German, French and British expeditions uncovered sensational finds, such as the cuneiform clay tablets known as the Amarna Letters and the iconic bust of Nefertiti. In Germany, Egyptological language research was blooming, with grammars, text editions and a large-scale project to create an Egyptian dictionary, which was also supported by the Carlsberg Foundation.

In interwar Europe, papyri were expensive to acquire due to intense competition among buyers from European and American museums and universities. Still, from 1930 to 1938, Lange managed to buy a large and extraordinarily significant amount of material, which was later named after Carlsberg. In 1939, the Carlsberg Foundation donated the collection to the University of Copenhagen, where it soon became a central basis for research and helped enhance the position of Egyptology as a university subject in Denmark.

The collection was later expanded on several occasions, including in 1954 and again more recently: in 2012, the acquisition of a private archive from a soldier serving just before the time of Cleopatra; in 2015, part of a 3,500-year-old medical text, whose other half is now at the Louvre and which is the second longest medical text from ancient Egypt; and in 2018 three early demotic documents from a private archive.

From the beginning, research into the material has been a time-consuming and highly specialised task. Much of the collection consists of small fragments that are painstaking to identify, piece together and interpret – an effort that has been going on from the founding of the collection and is still ongoing today. Most of the texts are in demotic or hieratic script. The demotic documents in particular are challenging, as this late Egyptian script is only mastered by a small number of specialists in the world.

A key turning point occurred in 1989 with the establishment of the International Committee for the Publication of the Carlsberg Papyri. This initiative brought together international specialists and was a significant boost for research. Under the leadership of the Egyptologist Paul John Frandsen (b.1943), the first volume of 'The Carlsberg Papyri' was published in 1991. Since then, the series has systematically published and annotated texts from the collection. By now, it includes 18 volumes, with many more in preparation for forthcoming publication. The published editions and annotations are widely used by scholars the world over.

Since 1999, the work has been continued with almost equal focus on hieratic and demotic texts. These new sources have proven invaluable for our understanding of administration, literature, science and religion in Graeco-Roman Egypt. Systematic studies have shed new light on texts about medicine, astronomy and temple organisation, among other topics. Today the collection contains about 1,400 texts and fragments.

The Papyrus Carlsberg Collection functions as a scientific laboratory, where each little scrap of papyrus is part of a larger puzzle that gradually combines into a picture of life in ancient Egypt – both on the dusty floors of building sites and in the shadow of large monuments.

The chapter is written by Dorthe Chakravarty.