Due to an event, the State Hall will be closed on Friday, December 12, 2025 from 5 p.m.
The reading rooms on Heldenplatz will be open during the Christmas holidays, with the exception of December 24 and 31 as well as public holidays. The reading rooms of the collections will only be open from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. between December 27, 2025 and January 5, 2026.
Please note the opening hours in December and around New Year's Eve.
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.