CIMRM Supplement - Mummy funerary inscription of priest of Mithra. Schöyen collection. From Egypt.

An inscription from a mummy, indicating the body was a priest of Mithra.

MS 247
MUMMY FUNERARY INSCRIPTION OF THE PRIEST OF MITHRAS, ORNOUPHIOS, SON OF ARTEMIS, LIVED 14 YEARS, CHOIAK 15, THE 3RD YEAR
MS in Greek on linen cloth, Egypt, late 1st c. BC, 1 cloth (complete), 14x39 cm, single column, (9x21 cm), 6 lines in Greek half-uncial. Provenance: 1. H.P. Kraus, New York.
Context: The collection of the renowned papyrologist Prof. Atiyah consisted of more than 677 papyri, mainly originating in Middle Egypt, including Oxyrhynchus and Fayum. The first part of 140 papyri (H.P. Kraus cat. 105(1961)), is now in Yale, Beinecke Library, while 242 Greek papyri is MS 244 and 295 Coptic papyri is MS 245 in The Schøyen Collection, see also MS 108.
Provenance: 1. Aziz Suryal Atiyah, Utah, USA ( - ca. 1960); 2. H. P. Kraus, New York, USA, (ca. 1960 - ); 3. Richard Linenthal Collection, London.

Probably the Persian rather than the Roman deity: a couple of temples of Persian Mithra did exist in Egypt after the Persian conquest.¹

J.R. Harris, "Mithras at Hermopolis and Memphis", in: Archaeological Research in Roman Egypt (1996) p.169: "References to a mithraion in two papyrus fragments of the 3rd c. B.C. have little to do with this[the Mithraic cult], as Wilcken instinctively recognised, and even assuming the temple (or temples), wherever located, survived over half a millennium, rebuilding or adaptation for Roman mithraic purposes is altogether unlikely. The same may also apply, I suspect, to the temple at Alexandria, the destruction of which is described in patristic sources, in terms that suggest a substantial and more-or-less public building. This is not the occasion to speculate as to the nature, in Egypt, of the pre-Roman cult, but simply to note that there is some evidence that it continued in parallel.".