Preface

The idea for this book dates back a decade or so as one of the editors (JGM) came to believe that legal papyrology was being relegated to an ever-diminishing corner of ancient history. Papyrology itself, the decipherment and interpretation of documents written (mostly) on the ancient paper called papyrus, recovered (predominantly) from Egypt, is a highly technical, and therefore somewhat naturally isolated, discipline. The use, or neglect, of papyrological publications by ancient historians not trained as papyrologists remains a matter of constant concern. In addition, even if (from our perspective) the lesser languages of the wider discipline (e.g., Aramaic, Pahlevi) and the earlier forms of Egyptian are set aside, the field has traditionally suffered a linguistic split between Greek (and Latin) documents on the one side, and Egyptian documents (Demotic, Coptic) on the other. The former tend to be the concern of those classicists who have chosen to “major” in papyrology, the latter the concern of Egyptologists. Still more, the legal scholarship on the corpora of published documents in both language sets is predominately written in German. The present volume, accordingly, aims to introduce readers to this major source of ancient legal documents, to heal the linguistic divide by including documents in both major language traditions, and to distill the literature of juristic scholarship based on these texts for the benefit of the reader in English. We present in this volume some texts that are well known to papyrologists, others that have hardly been studied. The selection is limited to documents from Egypt.