Episode 3420
Menches
Tue, 2026-Sep-15 01:30 UTC
Length - 2:57
Direct Link
Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day, your daily dose of knowledge from Wikipedia's finest articles.
The featured article for Tuesday, 15 September 2026, is Menches.
Menches was an ancient Egyptian official who served as the village scribe of Kerkeosiris from before 119 until 110 BC. He lived during the Ptolemaic period, when a Greek dynasty ruled Egypt. He was also known by the Greek name Asclepiades and may have been descended from Greek settlers, although little is known of his personal life.
His official responsibilities were to record land use and agriculture in Kerkeosiris and assess taxes owed to the pharaoh. In 118 BC, he was acquitted of attempted murder, after which he requested royal protection from harassment. Social instability complicated his duties; some of his fellow scribes went on strike in 118–117 BC and, in 114 BC, the village farmers cultivating royally owned land went on strike. The royal government granted Menches an allotment of farmland in 113 or 112 BC, although such grants were usually reserved for members of the military. Menches shared the office of scribe with Petesouchos in 111 BC, who replaced him the following year.
The exact location of Kerkeosiris is unknown, and the only known evidence for Menches's life is a collection of preserved papyrus documents from his scribal office. These papyri were reused to wrap mummified crocodiles at a temple in the city of Tebtunis in the 1st century BC. The papyri were rediscovered in 1900 when English archaeologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt excavated the temple's necropolis. Over the next 38 years, Hunt, Grenfell, and other scholars translated the papyri into English. The collected papyri are commonly known as the "archive of Menches" and are part of the Tebtunis archive at the Bancroft Library in the University of California, Berkeley. They are an important source of information about life in Egypt during the Ptolemaic period, including agricultural practices and local government.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:30 UTC on Tuesday, 15 September 2026.
For the full current version of the article, see Menches on Wikipedia.
This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.
Follow us on Bluesky at @wikioftheday.com.
Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.
Until next time, I'm standard Kendra.
|
|
