The Diary of Merer (also known as Papyrus Jarf) is the name for papyrus logbooks written over 4,500 years ago by Merer, a middle-ranking official with the title inspector (sḥḏ, sehedj). They are the oldest known papyri with text, dating to the 27th year of the reign of Pharaoh Khufu (reigned in the early 26th century BC, estimated c. 2589 – c. 2566 BC[1][2][3]) during the Fourth Dynasty of Egypt.[4] The text, written with (hieratic) hieroglyphs, mostly consists of lists of the daily activities of Merer and his crew. The best preserved sections (Papyrus Jarf A and B) document the transportation of white limestone blocks from the Tura quarries to Giza by boat.
Buried in front of man-made caves that served to store the boats at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast, the papyri were found and excavated in 2013 by a French mission under the direction of archaeologists Pierre Tallet of Paris-Sorbonne University and Gregory Marouard.[5][6][7][8] A popular account on the importance of this discovery was published by Pierre Tallet and Mark Lehner, calling the corpus "Red Sea scrolls"[9] (an allusion to the Dead Sea Scrolls).
The Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass describes the Diary of Merer as "the greatest discovery in Egypt in the 21st century."[4] Parts of the papyri are exhibited at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.[10]
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