Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The many thousands of papyri and ostraca surviving from this period, which are predominantly of routine administrative or legal content, allow us insight into the detailed working of the administrative and legal systems of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt unparalleled by comparison both with earlier Egyptian history and with other parts of the Hellenistic and Roman world. During the Ptolemaic Period, both Demotic and Greek were regularly used for administrative and legal documents, although the Demotic texts are only recently being accorded their full weight alongside the Greek in historical studies (Manning 2003; Clarysse and Thompson 2006). The tendency for Greek to gain ground at the expense of Demotic for documentary use, already noticeable by the later Ptolemaic Period, accelerated sharply under Roman rule, so that our evidence for administration and law in the Roman Period is very largely written in Greek.It is, however, not easy to form a balanced overall picture of how the administration and law operated, because the evidence is so patchy, being intensively concentrated (often in the form of “archives” or dossiers) in a few locations, and even there documenting only some specific procedures over a short time-span. Most of our evidence comes from the Fayum (named the Arsinoite nome from 257 bc) and parts of what the Roman administration termed the “Heptanomia,” the Nile valley nomes ... log in or subscribe to read full text