Hermitage Museum

The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia, grew from the art collection Catherine the Great began in 1764 and opened to the public in 1852. Its buildings include the Winter Palace, former residence of the tsars, and its collections run from prehistoric finds to modern art.

The museum's name is attached to Papyrus Hermitage 1115, the only surviving copy of the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, a Middle Kingdom Egyptian story in which a sailor cast away on an island meets a giant talking serpent. The Russian Egyptologist Vladimir Golenishchev came across the papyrus in the Imperial Hermitage collection in the 1880s; how it got there is not recorded. The Egyptologist Miriam Lichtheim noted that the papyrus was later kept in Moscow, while the Hermitage's own digital collection lists sheets of the tale, so its current home is reported differently by different sources.

The papyrus is also called Papyrus Leningrad 1115 from the city's Soviet-era name. Scholars date the story to the Middle Kingdom, roughly 2040 to 1782 BCE, and it is often called the oldest surviving tale of a castaway.