According to George Reisner (who published plates of the papyrus in 1905), the Hearst Papyrus was received in the spring of 1901 at the camp of the Hearst Expedition in Egypt from a peasant of the nearby village of Deir el-Ballas, as a thank-you for being allowed to take fertilizer from their dump-heaps.[1] It was later named after Phoebe Hearst (the mother of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate) who funded much of that expedition carried out by the University of California.[2]