Turin Satirical-Erotic Papyrus

This roll was painted at Deir el-Medina, the village of the craftsmen who cut the royal tombs at Thebes, some time in the 20th Dynasty, which the museum places between 1190 and 1077 BC. It reads from right to left, and it opens on a world turned upside down. Animals wear clothes, play musical instruments and fight with bows and arrows. Cats, the natural hunters, are at the mercy of mice and birds, and gazelles lead lions away as prisoners, with long sticks and ropes. Animals acting out human roles turn up on other drawings from the same village too, so these jokes seem to have been familiar ones.

The rest of the roll holds erotic scenes, which the museum reads as caricatures of working men, made for an owner wealthy enough to afford papyrus. The roll reached Turin in many fragments. In a restoration supported by the Fondazione CRC, a foundation from Cuneo in Piedmont, conservators remounted them with strips of removable Japanese paper and put several misplaced pieces back where they belong.