Due to a police closure of Josefsplatz, the State Hall will open on Tuesday, October 21, starting 12 noon only.
The Augustinian Reading Room will not open until 12.30 p.m. on this day.
Due to a police closure of Josefsplatz, the State Hall will open on Wednesday, October 22, starting 12 noon only.
The Augustinian Reading Room will be closed on this day. Reading activities will be relocated to the study reading room of the collection of manuscripts and old prints.
Due to an event, the State Hall will be closed on Friday, October 31, from 3 p.m.
The reading rooms on Heldenplatz will be closed on Sunday, October 26 (National Holiday), Saturday, November 1 (All Saints' Day) and Sunday, November 2, 2025 (All Souls' Day).
The State Hall, Literature Museum, Papyrus Museum, Globe Museum and Esperanto Museum will be open during their regular opening hours.
Almost all the items in our collection come from Egypt, where papyrus has been preserved by the dry climate. The oldest items date from about the 15th century B.C., the most recent from about the 16th century A.D.
The documents record all the languages and scripts that were used over the turbulent history of the land of the Nile since the time of the New Kingdom of the pharaohs. The majority of them are in Arabic, Greek or Coptic, but hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic texts are kept as well. The less numerous Hebrew, Aramaic, Syrian, Ethiopian and Latin texts and the documents in Pahlavi (Middle Persian) are of great importance historically, because they document the multilingual culture of the country or shed light on specific historic situations.