This article offers a preliminary exploration of the characteristic uses of all-inclusive terms and expressions in Greek legal documents of Byzantine Egypt. Through the utilization of these terms and expressions Byzantine notaries formulated clauses and formulas in a genus-species-genus word sequence. This notarial technique of exhaustiveness can be identified with the rhetorical figure of enumeratio.
Twelfth installment of an annual overview of published inscriptions in Greek and Coptic from Christian Egypt and Nubia.
- The Nile has always been a fundamental source of food and life, not only because of its annual flooding of arable land, but also because of its abundance of fish, which led to the emergence and ubiquity of the fishing profession in Egypt. Documentary papyri testify to intensive fishing activities during the reign of the Ptolemies, especially in the Fayum. Traditionally, most historians have regarded the Ptolemaic fishing industry as a strictly regulated state monopoly with the Fayum as its epicenter, while in Upper Egypt it was supposedly extended or replaced by a tax on fishermen, the tistiaptir Xi wv pound. Based on a thorough analysis of both Greek and Demotic documents as well as the historical context, this article offers a more nuanced picture, moving away from the monopoly hypothesis and arguing that the difference in organization and control of the fishing industry between the Fayum (direct management) and Upper Egypt (occupational taxation) was a deliberate, well-considered choice by the Ptolemaic state.
The back of P.Mich. inv. 2008 contains (the upper part of) an exercise in arithmetic. Although the text is written in continuous lines, as in prose, rather than according to colometry, we suggest that it was originally an epigram in either dactylic hexameters or elegiac distichs. The present layout can be explained as resulting from the limited width of the papyrus sheet or because meter was not considered essential for an arithmetic exercise. Interestingly, a similar type of arithmetic exercise is still found nowadays in various tests in schools of engineering and technology.
An incompletely published papyrus currently in the University of Michigan collection is inscribed with an applied erotic binding spell in Demotic to cause a man to lust after a woman. The relative paucity of applied Demotic spells combined with the rare occurrence of love spells in which the beneficiary is a woman and the target a man makes this manuscript nearly unique in its content. The following article compares this applied manuscript to the Greco-Egyptian formularies and demonstrates the intertextuality between the two corpora, down to technical vocabulary, formula, and particular passages. Although previously suggested to be from the Fayum, that provenience is called into question and further suggestions about potential lines of transmission from applied manuscript to formularies are offered.
Report on the findspots and archaeological context of the Tebtunis papyri in Padua from the Italian excavations in the 1930s, together with a survey of the Egyptian texts. Inan appendix, it is argued that a food production unit in the northern insula along the dromos, identified as a horrea by the excavators, might have serviced the neighboring deipneteria.
This article presents an edition of two Christian funerary stelae in Greek on display in the Luxor Museum of Art.
P.Mich. inv. 7169 is a small, L-shaped piece of papyrus preserving parts of Odyssey 4.380-390. It is a joining piece of the same book-roll as P.Mich. inv. 3390, which was previously published on its own. They are now presented in a single edition for the first time, and together preserve portions of Odyssey 4.355-390. The chief textual interest of the papyrus is the preservation of the reading tau omicron nu epsilon iota at the beginning of 4.388. This variant is attested in multiple manuscripts and the indirect tradition, which excludes the possibility of a scribal error here. Hitherto it has been rejected because it seems to violate the hexameter by starting a line with a short syllable. I will argue, however, that it can and should be read metrically, based on the complicated metrical behavior of continuant consonants in early Greek poetry. This metrical defense, coupled with explicit papyrological evidence and its wide attestation, makes a strong case that tau omicron nu epsilon iota should be accepted as the true reading of the verse. Further parallels will also be adduced, including other cases where scribes have attempted to fix "deficient" meter.
Between 1947 and 1962, mining financier and collector A. Chester Beatty (1875-1968) acquired a plethora of papyri and parchments, from near-complete codices to tiny fragments. Records identifying each fragment with a purchase date, place, source, and price never existed. Using archival documentation in the Chester Beatty museum and other archives, this article identifies twelve unique acquisitions, purchased primarily from the Cairo-and Cyprus-based antiquities dealer Phocion J. Tano. This paper outlines the evidence for each transaction and identifies, with a greater or lesser degree of certainty, the material associated with each. For many of the smaller fragments, the acquisition dates remain unknown.
This article offers a new interpretation of a distinctive group of funerary inscriptions known as the "Kappa-series" from the necropolis of Terenouthis in the western Nile Delta, all dated to the same day-11 Hathyr (7/8 November) in the twentieth year of an unnamed emperor. Previous attempts to explain this phenomenon have invoked epidemic, accident, or local catastrophe, but none adequately accounts for the demographic pattern or the scale of mortality. Through a close re-examination of the epigraphic, prosopographic, and numismatic evidence, and by situating these inscriptions within the broader context of Roman Egypt, the article argues that the deaths most plausibly occurred during the Jewish uprising of 116-117 CE, on 7 November in the 20th year of Trajan's reign. The paper situates Terenouthis within the broader context of the revolt, tracing how violence spread from Cyrenaica into Egypt's rural hinterlands. It also considers environmental constraints-the timing of the Nile's annual inundation and its gradual recession in the Delta-which would have made an inland advance from the coast feasible only in late October. This factor aligns the Terenouthis deaths with the initial phase of rebel incursions into the western Nile Valley in November 116 CE.
- This text represents a documentary type of which only three other examples are known in Greek papyri. The antigrapheus Teos, who oversees a group of granaries in the region around the Herakleopolite village Phys, records that the granary at Phys has received 146 3/4 artabai of wheat as payment for seed and rent of royal land.
The analysis of dateable papyrus fragments sold to Duke University by renowned manuscript conservator and antiquities dealer A. Fackelmann suggests that he misrepresented dates and provenance information. Fackelmann, as an expert conservator of cartonnage papyri, was an important partner for institutions like Duke University that were seeking to establish major papyrus collections in the mid-twentieth century, because cartonnage was the primary source of new papyrus discoveries at this time. However, Fackelmann has a demonstrated history of making spurious claims about papyri he extracted from cartonnage. A provenance study of Duke's acquisitions from Fackelmann illuminates why and how Fackelmann's questionable claims were made and were broadly accepted by university libraries and contemporary papyrologists.
- Although little known and less appreciated in Trinity College Dublin, Gilbart Smyly was recognised by international colleagues as one of the best readers of Greek papyri in the first generation of those working in the new discipline of papyrology. He was also a distinguished and industrious editor of the medieval manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College. This article seeks to place him in his social and academic context.
Edition of a documentary papyrus (P.NYU inv. 30) coming from the upper administration and dated to 4 February 261 during the reign of Macrianus and Quietus. The text presents an exact figure that is apparently the total size of cultivated land in the Oxyrhynchite nome, and gives a large figure for a quantity of olive oil. There is a unique reference to patrimonium.
Both corrected and uncorrected accidental scribal mistakes in Greek documentary papyri are collected and analyzed in this article in order to observe and to examine the cognitive processes during their production, such as perseveration, anticipation and reversal. A categorization is proposed that also allows one to analyze performance errors in documents that have not been copied visually. Based on close observation of both scribal and editorial practices involved in the correction of accidental mistakes, some general principles are formulated with regard to the editorial notation of these mistakes.
- A full edition of four contracts from second century Theadelphia. P.Ryl. 2.324, 330, and 332 belong to the so-called archive of "Aphrodisios son of Philippos, and descendants"; P.Ryl. 2.331 seems unrelated to the archive but is written in the same handwriting as P.Ryl. 2.330 and 332. Connections with other papyri and people from Theadelphia will be analyzed, shedding light on the scribes of the grapheion of the village in the second century CE.
This article offers an annotated edition of six letters and one postcard from the pens of Ulrich Wilcken, Heinrich Sch & auml;fer and Adolf Erman related to the excavation of papyri carried out by Wilcken and Sch & auml;fer in Heracleopolis Magna from January to March 1899. Despite the establishment of numerous modern villages, stone-quarrying and sebakhin activities in the area, the ruins of the ancient settlement were still quite impressive at that time. Documenting one of the first papyrus excavations conducted in Egypt, the letters assembled here shed new light on the course and findings of this exemplary, but ill-fated excavation, as well as on the characters of its protagonists. The information contained in Wilcken's excavation report published in APF 2 and the correspondence edited here is supplemented and illustrated by previously unpublished photos of the campaign from the private archive of Ludwig Borchardt.
- The Zenon archive contains approximately 1145 letters ranging from ca 263 to 229 BCE. Even though this is one of the largest and better-preserved archives from Antiquity-and hence one of the best-known to modern scholarship-the authorship of some of these letters still remains unknown to us, due to the fragmentary state in which many of these documents have survived. Based on an analysis that combines the paleography and layout of the text with both the linguistic style and the function and purpose of the letter, it is suggested that the author of one of these "anonymous" letters-namely PSI 6.570-should be identified as Hierokles (TM Per 2071; Pros.Ptol. 4.11452 = 6.17146), one of Zenon's friends and keeper of a palestra in Alexandria.
-- Full edition of two descripta from P.Tebt. 1. 129 is a petition of 112 BCE to the komogrammateus Menches from a crown tenant who was attacked at a threshing floor while he was sleeping near it to protect his harvest; 156 is a bond of surety from 91 BCE provided for Alkimos by Pitholas and Petalos: the two sureties undertake to produce him before the archiphylakites of Kerkeosiris within an established timeframe, or else they will be liable in his place. One of them, a "slow writer," appends his own signature at the end of the document.
