"Piecing Together the Evidence": On Two Jewish Families from Edfu in the Aramaic Documents from the Ptolemaic Period

Our knowledge of the Jewish community of Edfu from the Ptolemaic period is very little. The only evidence we have are a few papyri in Aramaic and even fewer inscriptions from the local cemetery. Although these texts have been adequately collected and edited in the past - and now once again within the framework of the Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum IV - they hardly ever have been put together and read in a coherent way. This paper investigates the connections between the Aramaic papyri, the funerary epitaphs and some local and contemporary Demotic documents. Reading these documents together, reveals the fate of two local Jewish families, which will be discussed in this paper with the aim of shedding some light on the local Jewish community.