INTRODUCTION

Romanisation, although the word is now unfashionable, is the umbrella term for complex and centuries-long phenomena of cultural exchange that created a diverse but recognisably similar Mediterranean world by AD 250. Ancient legal documents and their physical forms can shed light on this process, especially in important aspects like the degree and speed of the spread of Roman legal practices and the Greek language in the Roman East, the number of local components retained, and how (possibly even why) neighbouring peoples reacted differently to Roman examples. In (1) choice of tongue, (2) dating formulae, (3) physical construction, and (4) modes of witnessing, each legal document represents a choice its principal actors made, and thus offers possible evidence of how different people acted or adjusted differently within different judicial and legal systems. A group of Roman-period documents found in the Judaean desert but deriving from the Roman province of Arabia, compared with a less well-preserved set of documents hailing from the neighbouring province of Judaea, suggests precisely this: that the four aspects of language, dating, form and witnessing are interrelated; that principals were free to choose; and that their choices reflect and embody positive or negative reactions to Roman documentary and administrative practices. Moreover, the documents themselves may as a consequence provide a way of judging the likelihood – and here as elsewhere I follow Hannah Cotton's lead – of what system of law the people who made the documents were most likely to be using: Jewish, Hellenistic Greek, or Roman.