ISAC Visiting Scholar Lecture: Prof. Dr. Verena Lepper

Join Verena Lepper, J. Paul Getty Museum's Senior Curator of Antiquities, as she discusses “Elephantine. Island of the Millennia”. Elephantine. Island of the Millennia Elephantine is an island on the Nile River in southern Egypt. This trade and border center was home to a uniquely diverse population. Here, a whole range of languages, cultures and religions existed side by side. It is the only place where 4,000 years of unbroken cultural history can be traced through written sources. Thousands of texts can be found on papyrus or clay shards written in ten different languages and scripts, including Hieroglyphics, Hieratic, Demotic, Aramaic, Coptic and Arabic. Today, they are held in 60 collections in 24 different countries worldwide and have been deciphered before being translated and catalogued. After a seven-year research project funded by a European Research Council Grant titled ”Localizing 4000 Years of Cultural History: Texts and Scripts from Elephantine Island in Egypt, for the first time, more than 10,000 papyri and ostraca from the island have been digitally unlocked by an international research team. Through international cooperation, the “papyrus puzzle” can thus be solved – also with the help of cutting-edge new methods from the digital humanities. Mathematicians and physicists made it possible thanks to computer tomography to “virtually” unfold the rolled papyri and papyrus packages, making them legible for the first time in history. Verena is the Anissa and Paul John Balson II Senior Curator of Antiquities & Head of Antiquities, J. Paul Getty Museum Verena joined the Getty Museum’s Department of Antiquities in 2025. A distinguished Egyptologist and curator, she served for 17 years as curator of Egyptian and Oriental Papyri at the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection, Berlin (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). She has led major international exhibitions and research projects in Germany and abroad, including in Doha, Abu Dhabi, and at Harvard University. Verena also directed the Institute of Ancient Near Eastern and Hellenistic Religion at Humboldt University in Berlin where she is Honorary Professor. To strengthen cultural diplomacy between Germany and the Arab world, she founded the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA) in 2013, which she continues to lead. A graduate of the University of Bonn, she holds a PhD in Egyptology, Semitic Studies, and Oriental Studies after having studied at Bonn, Oxford, and HarvardUniversity . She is the author of 20 books and numerous articles.