These manuscripts may comprise an “archive”, meaning that they were brought together and deposited by an ancient person or persons.

The manuscripts were sold or donated to European collections in four groups (see Dosoo 2016):

1. Lot of ca. 5,600 items prepared in 1827, sold to the Dutch Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in 1828: PDM/PGM XII, PGM XIII, PDM/PDM XIV (part), P. Leid. I 397
2. Donation to the Royal Museum in Stockholm prior to August 1832: P. Holm. + PGM Va
3. Lot of 1,326 items sold to the British Museum in 1839: PGM V, PGM VI
4. Lot of 1,129 items prepared in 1846 and sold in 1857 in a public auction in Paris and acquired by multiple collections: PGM I, PGM II (Berlin Museum); PGM IV (Bibliothèque Nationale de France); PDM/PDM XIV (part) (British Museum); PDM Suppl. (Musée du Louvre)

All of the manuscripts were assigned a provenance of Thebes in Anastasy’s catalogues, except PGM VI, which was given a provenance in Memphis, but is part of the same document as PGM II. The manuscripts were likely purchased by Anastasy’s agents from Egyptians living in these areas; in a letter of 1828 he describes the purchase of two parts of PDM/PGM XII from “Arabs”.

The linguistic and textual contents of the archive suggest that (at least in its early phases) it belonged to an individual trained in the Egyptian priesthood. The oldest layer (including the Demotic Myth of the Sun’s Eye, M160 recto) is a Egyptian mythological text. The Demotic language and demotic and hieratic scripts, in which three late second or early third century manuscripts (M160, M162, M163) are written, were restricted to the Egyptian priesthood in the Roman Period, and the Old Coptic scripts found in the fourth century PGM IV (M3) derive from, and are also most frequently attested in, the same context. The dialect of the Demotic texts suggests an origin in the region of Thebes (Johnson 1977). The Old Coptic contents of PGM IV are more diverse, suggesting texts with multiple dialectal origins being collected from diverse sources (Love 2016).

The earliest text is the mythological text the Myth of the Sun’s Eye (M160 recto). The majority of the archive contains magical texts (M3, M151, M152, M153, M160, M161, M162, M163; M164), although two are alchemical (M159, M164), containing recipes for alloying and colouring metals, creating purple dye, gold and silver inks, and making precious stones from non-precious materials. One of these contains a loose sheet with a magical invocation (PGM Va=M159). PDM/PGM XII (M160) also contains some material which could be considered alchemical.