Documentary Papyrology

An overview of the variety of textual differences that exist between the Apocalypse in Codex Sinaiticus and the book in modern critical editions, thereby offering a window into the book's early readership. There is also a YouTube link to the lecture version of this paper, which was recently delivered at Samford University for their Holley Hull Lecture Series: https://vimeo.com/878444925/a35492dd8b?share=copy&fbclid=IwAR10Iu7HKuAjjcEcDdxgfT7XKqe2F6W6Bwb1cVHafNO0Yz6g4VhsIhXHMz4

A perspective on the nature of the Roman legal order in the provinces and the status of local laws and practices under Roman rule. These questions are explored through a series of case studies from Roman Egypt, including the well-known petition of Dionysia (P. Oxy. II 237).

Papyrology has always been in the vanguard of the application of information technology to its own scientifi c purposes. The volume represents the first attempt to deal monographically with the electronic resources for the papyrological research, tracing an epistemology, a historical sketch and an overview of the main trends in the developing network of the digital tools for the study of the ancient papyri.

The study addresses the legal rules that allowed in Rome and in some Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, especially Egypt, women to serve as guardians or to assist the guardian of their prepubescent children. In Rome, mothers as guardians are attested during the second century by individual imperial concession, and the mother as manager in aid to the guardian is amply attested in the classical age. In Egypt, mothers could serve as guardians, appointed by a private act of the husband (since the beginning of the province until 212 AD), while in connection to the guardian (with the name ἐπακολουθήτρια) they appear only from the first half of the second century ad. the author questions the mutual influences between the two sets of rules.

Nel presente articolo si esaminano le norme giuridiche in base alle quali a Roma e in alcune province orientali dell'impero romano, soprattutto l'Egitto, la madre poteva essere tutrice o poteva svolgere fuzioni di ausilio al tutore dei propri figli impuberi. A Roma la madre tutrice appare attestata già dal secondo secolo per concessione imperiale individuale, e la madre amministratrice in ausilio al tutore è ampiamente attestata in età classica. In Egitto la madre tutrice, nominata con atto privato del marito, compare dalle origini della provincia e fino al 212 d.C., mentre, affiancata al tutore, con il nome di ἐπακολουθήτρια, è documentata solo dalla prima metà del secondo secolo d.C. In dottrina ci si è interrogati circa le influenze reciproche tra i due sistemi di norme. L'autore conclude che è legittimo ipotizzare che la scomparsa della madre tutrice egizia dopo il 212 sia stata causata dalla diffusione del diritto romano nelle province a seguito della Constitutio Antoniniana, mentre non sembra possibile rinvenire altre reciproche influenze. In particolare, si nega che la madre amministratrice romana sia derivata dall'ἐπακολουθήτρια egizia.

Reconsideration of the only known apprenticeship contract on papyrus from Ptolemaic period, which concerns the teaching of medicine. Written twice on the back of an account ( P.Heid. III 225) by a unexperienced hand of the end of the IIIrd century B.C., this document could be a scribal exercise in order to master technical terms and juridical syntaxis.

The usual approach to a document and its analysis focus on the written status, contents and material features. However, the study of the letter requests an additional procedure, since we must take into account that half of the correspondence is missing. But is this the only missing element? If the cursus publicus guaranteed the carriage of government messages, the average citizen needed to entrust his message to someone who happened to be going in the right direction. The letter carrier, when trusted, was often charged with some oral informations, now necessarily gone. Evidences of this habit can be found in papyri, as in epistolary collections. In the latter, the messenger is occasionally designated by the expression ἔμψυχος ἐπιστολή, “animated letter”, in opposition to the ἄψυχος ἐπιστολή, “inanimate letter”. Therefore, the person in charge to transmit the main message gradually takes over the informative use of the written letter.
This paper represents an attempt to question the simple qualification of the letter as a material document and to illustrate the further employ of the private literary letter in Late Antiquity, at a time when contemporary rhetoric and art of epistolography considerably influenced it.

In Byzantine and Early Islamic Egypt, the office of the pagarch was an administrative institution held responsible essentially for matters of taxation. There are, however, numerous references to pagarchs acting in the interest of public security. It seems, therefore, likely to assume that they were also ‘ex officio’ in charge of prisons. The present article evaluates that subject by analyzing the pagarchs’s relations to 1) prisons in the civitates, 2) so-called “public” prisons, and 3) prisons of the large estates.

In this paper, BGU VI 1242 and 1311, which shed some light on the implementation of the tax farming system into Ptolemaic Egypt, are re-edited and systematically commented on for the first time. Each text reveals certain administrative procedures by which tax farmers worked in cooperation with public institutions.

A bureaucratic society like that of ancient Egypt, where almost every single official act was recorded, generated a considerable amount of “paperwork” (primarily papyri, but also ostraca and wooden tablets). The documentation stored in the central archives at Alexandria has not survived due to the soil conditions in this region, but copies and registers of private contracts were kept in the record offices in the countryside, while the original contracts remained in the hands of the contracting parties, who stored them in their personal archives. This chapter presents archives of both official and private nature, focusing on the documents they contained and the insight they give into the lives of people and their dealings with the bureaucratic machine in ancient Egypt.

This is the first comprehensive treatment of an archaeological dataset from the archaeological exploration of Bir Shawish, a late antique settlement in Egypt's Western Desert. Dating to around 400 CE, these primary historical sources include documentary texts written on ostraka, informal inscriptions on various ceramic objects, plus a group of incised lids. The core of the volume consists of an annotated edition and analytical indices. This is prefaced by the historical and archaeological context and is followed by a synthesis of selected issues inherent to the published material. The book includes appendices and pictures of all published objects.

Doubling the number of texts and inscriptions published to date from the Small Oasis, this new corpus furthers our understanding of the economic, administrative, and social history of late antique Egypt.

A revised version of my PhD dissertation in Egyptology (Charles University in Prague, June 2015), it includes 230 pages of text, 96 illustrations, and 15 tables.

Che si tratti di prescrizioni e ricette di medicamenti vari, manuali e trattati di medicina, o semplici lettere e documenti scritti da antichi dottori, i papiri greci d’Egitto offrono un punto di vista privilegiato, nella quotidianità della pratica d’uso, sull’arte medica ellenistico-romana. Innumerevoli i percorsi d’indagine e di scoperta che si celano nei difficili frammenti di cui Isabella Andorlini rimane un’insuperata interprete e studiosa.

Il volume costituisce la raccolta degli studi che Isabella Andorlini ha dedicato, nell’arco di più di trent’anni di ricerca, alle testimonianze papiracee della medicina greco-romana in Egitto. Articoli ormai introvabili affiancano le ultime pubblicazioni, tracciando variegati percorsi multidisciplinari dedicati alla ricettazione medica antica, alle testimonianze testuali delle pratiche mediche e delle malattie, ai  supporti materiali del sapere medico antico, a progetti passati e presenti che idealmente connettono l’iniziale impresa di un Corpus dei papiri greci di medicina ai più recenti risultati del Progetto ERC DIGMEDTEXT per una banca dati online di tali testi, ad alcune tematiche affini quali l’alimentazione, la manifattura tessile e la circolazione dei beni di lusso, sempre attraverso lo specchio dei papiri.

The Department of "Cultures History Religions" of the University of Rome "La Sapienza" will soon issue a public call for applications concerning a public competiions with qualifications and interview assesments, for the award of n. 3 PostDoc Positions for research activities within the ERC funded Project NOTAE  – NOT A writtEn word but graphic symbols. NOTAE: An evidence-based reconstruction of another written world in pragmatic literacy from Late Antiquity to early medieval Europe [ERC ADG 2017 N° 786572].

Three new papyri from the Austrian National Library provide insight into the dealings of a local subordinate of Athenodoros, the Ptolemaic dioiketes who held office at least from 197 to 190 BCE. The texts are all addressed to a certain Δημήτριος ὁ παρὰ Ἀθηνoδώρου τοῦ διοικητοῦ, who is without a doubt also the addressee of CPR 28.11. Demetrios appears to have been responsible for various fiscal matters somewhere in the north of the Herakleopolite nome: solving problems in regard to some tax issue, protecting naukleroi against supposedly unjustified freight charges, protecting a worker against fiscal demands on the part of a security officer, and, possibly, organizing a grain transport.

This is a book chapter presenting written sources made available through the recent exploration of Egypt's El Hayz Oasis. It opens with an overview of papyrological and epigraphical documentation from the rural settlement of Bir Shawish, while the bulk of the chapter represents the edition of written and inscribed material from the same site including texts and notations on earthenware and decorated jar stoppers.

A thorough lexical study based on the evidence of documentary papyri can be crucial in the effort to throw new light on material and socio-cultural aspects of the ancient world, especially when combined with other sources such as the archaeological artefacts. This integrated and interdisciplinary approach can unlock fresh ways to re-construe the past and leads to reflect on new possible tasks of papyrology in future.

This brief contribution uses archaeobotanical data to quantify the edible weight and energetic value of a khar of emmer wheat and
a khar of barley. It then combines these data with emmer and barley prices from late New Kingdom Deir el-Medina to argue that,
contrary to conventional wisdom, emmer wheat was more expensive per calorie than barley during most of this period. It furthermore
argues that emmer wheat and barley were delivered to the workers in almost equal quantities.