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;; We know Cleopatra's story -- floating down the Nile and making sweet talk with Mark Antony -- but what did all those other Egyptians do, aside from fanning the queen and making mummies?
The world has long been intrigued by that famous epoch when the sunset of the Greek empire met the dawn of the Roman over the pyramids of the ancient pharaohs. But much of the texture of that time has remained hidden.
Now, new windows into that era are being opened at the University of California-Berkeley, where an international team of researchers is making some of those ancient mummies spill their long-held secrets.
After being wrapped, mummies were encased in "papyrus-mache" coverings made of recycled documents written on papyrus, the plant-based Egyptian equivalent of paper, said Todd Hickey, curator of Berkeley's immense horde of papyri extracted from mummy casings.
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Of the large deposits of papyri known to exist around the world, the university's holds special fascination for scholars because it is the least mined, said professor Karl-Theodor Zauzich, a highly regarded authority on ancient Egyptian writing.
"It's fantastic material," said Zauzich, a professor at Germany's Wurzburg University who has joined the special six-week seminar that began this week at Berkeley.
"There is not a single text that you do not get information from."
"It's massive, and it was neglected for so many years," Hickey said. "You have all this unknown material and a real potential for the students to find something historically important."
Past excursions into the Berkeley archive fished out some important literary fragments, including a lost play by Sophocles called "Inachos." Mostly the scraps have been household accounts, petitions to government officials and the like.
The collection of more than 30,000 fragments -- said by Berkeley officials to be the largest on this side of the globe -- came to Berkeley courtesy of Phoebe Hearst, mother of the newspaper magnate who inspired the movie "Citizen Kane" and the conglomerate that owns the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
A century ago, Hearst spent a large part of her husband's mining fortune to make the University of California a great institution, and one of her efforts was financing a 1899-1900 expedition to the site of the ancient Egyptian town of Tebtunis, a project that yielded papyri-encased crocodile mummies from Cleopatra's time and human mummies from preceding eras.
"She was trying to put Berkeley on the map," said classics professor Donald Mastronarde, director of Berkeley's Center for the Tebtunis Papyri. "All the major universities in France, Germany and Britain were collecting great masses of papyri."
But with those able to read such texts in short supply and the chronic funding shortages at public universities, Berkeley's papyri have remained mostly uncataloged.
"This collection is great," exclaimed Andrew Monson, a doctoral candidate from Stanford and one of a dozen graduate students in the seminar. "You have so many primary texts."
The seminar is funded by the campus under the auspices of the American Society of Papyrologists, also known as ASP, an acronym recalling the method by which Cleopatra is said to have arranged her journey across the River Styx.
Although Berkeley's collection includes material from Cleopatra's time, the current seminar will concentrate on somewhat earlier human-mummy texts from the third and second centuries B.C., when the stage was set for Cleopatra's dramatic curtain-closer of the long Ptolemaic Dynasty, which ruled Egypt from 305 to 30 B.C.
Cleopatra was the last in the line descended from Ptolemy, Alexander the Great's general who became the first ruler of Egypt under Greek occupation.
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