Women's Letters from Ancient Egypt 300 BC - AD 800 by Roger S. Bagnall and Rafaella Cribiore

Abstract

248 BOOK REVIEWS toinformednon-specialistseagerforfurtherBlueGuide-styletidbitswhenvisiting Rome. JENNIFER FERRISS-HILL University of Miami, j.ferrisshill@miami.edu * * * * * Women’s Letters from Ancient Egypt 300 BC – AD 800. By ROGER S. BAGNALL andRAFAELLA CRIBIORE. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Pp. xiii + 440. Paper, $45.00. ISBN 978-472-03622-6. With its unique introduction to Egyptian feminine epistolography of the classical and late periods, this volume is a useful resource to fill out the otherwise predominantlyandrocentricclassicalsources.Itis,therefore,awelcome and more affordablerepublishing,inpaperback,ofthe2006hardcoveredition.Welearn,for example, that Herais is trying to regain land seized by Valerius Apolinarius, to whom she had lent money (313). Thermouthas and Valeria explain to their “brother” that they will travel once Herois, a woman in their household, has given birth (189). Eudaimonis complains to her daughter that she has had difficulty in finding women to work in the family weaving shop and that her workers are requesting higher wages (143–4). Women’s Letters provides us with these and other snapshots of women’s concerns as they themselves voiced them. Women’sLettersisdivided into two parts.The firstpartin ten chapters(1–93), gives readers unfamiliar with Ptolemaic and Roman Egyptian letters not only a clearerpictureofsomeaspectsofEgyptianwomen’slives,butalsoanintroduction to the problems and concerns faced by scholarly study of these letters. For those readersunfamiliarwithEgyptiansocietyandepistolaryconventionsofthisperiod, the authors provide practical help in reading the letters, including greeting formulas, customary phrases of adoration before deities (proskynema), money and dating. The explanation of one convention, the use of kinship terms, is particularly important, for the women usually addressed men as “brother,” which had a variety of meanings ranging from sibling, husband, brother-in-law, distant BOOK REVIEWS 249 relativeorevenfriendorbusinesspartner,makingitdifficultforareadertobeclear about the relationship between writer and addressee. Other topics raise questions about how we might ascertain what level of education the woman correspondent may have had or how at ease she was in writingtheGreek lettersherself;whetherthe letterwasdictated and retainsaclose approximation of what she actually said or whether the scribe paraphrased her words; what social level did the woman hold and how wealthy was she; how free wasshetotravelandwhymightshedoso;andtowhatextentwassheinvolvednot only in household management but in business. The authors discuss the chronological distribution of the letters and the archives in which some were found, as well as the discovery of the various letters but here, too, there are problems and uncertainties. Some letters fortunately come from an archive or collection that provide some context for the women’s lives. For example, the Athenodoros Archive is a collection of letters taken from mummy cartonnagefoundatAbusirel-Melek(ancientBusiris);Athenodoroswasanestate manager. But we have in many instances no context, for the women or their familiesdonotappearinanysourceotherthantheseletters.However,theauthors discussatsomelengthlatemedievallettersascomparandainordertoalleviatethis lack of context. While these medieval sources (the Paston, Stonor, Plumpton and Celys collections) themselves have some contextual gaps, Bagnall and Cribiore argue that they can use these medieval collections to raise questions and develop hypotheses about “social and economic standing, handwriting and literacy, and the degree to which the language of the letters is a direct representation of the author's thoughts” (27).1 In chapters 8, 6 and 7 respectively, Bagnall and Cribiore test these questions and hypotheses against the Egyptian letters. The second half of the book is divided into two parts: letters from twenty-one archives and dossiers (104 letters), and letters illustrating themes and topics (106 letters). Almost every archival or dossier section is introduced by a summary of what is known about the context of the collection. The section on themes and topics includes family matters and health; business matters; legal matters; getting and sending; work, including agriculture, weaving and clothes making, and 1 ThePastonswerealargelandowningfamilyofNorfolk;theircollection oflettersrun from 1492 to 1509. The Stonors were wealthy landowners with holdings in Oxfordshire and other counties; theirlettersrunfrom1290–1483.ThePlumptonswereYorkshirelandowners;boththeStonorsand Plumptons held the rank of knight since the 13th century. Of lower social class were the Celys, who were wool merchants of London and Calais. The Plumpton letters date from 1461 to the mid-16th century; the Celys letters and documents run from 1472–1488. 250 BOOK REVIEWS miscellaneous (e.g. military; child’s nurse); journeys; literacy and education; religion; epistolary types (e.g. “urgent!”, “just greetings and good wishes”; “double letters on a sheet...