The Oracular Amuletic Decrees: A Question of Length

The Third Intermediate Period Oracular Amuletic Decrees, divine decrees worn as amulets that promise protection, are written on strips of papyrus of widely varying lengths that often bear no clear relationship to the amount of text on the papyrus. On the basis of the documents themselves and a possible ethnographic parallel, it is suggested that the lengths of the strips of papyrus on which these texts were written reflect the heights of the persons for whom they were written.