147Minding the Gap: The Administrative Documents of the Old Kingdom and the Wadi el-Jarf Archive

Administrative documentation from the Egyptian Old Kingdom remains very limited -the choice made very early to use papyrus, an eminently perishable material, has certainly deprived researchers of particularly interesting sources for studying the internal organisation of the Egyptian state at the time of its formation.However, a few batches of papyrus from this period have survived; the most important series being those from the port of Wadi el-Jarf on the Red Sea and the royal temples of Abusir in the Memphite area.But even here, a series of extrapolations highlights the enormous loss of sources: the data recording system shows that hundreds of thousands of documents must have originally existed, of which only a few dozen have been found to date.