Papyrological Sources Research Articles

Voices from Late Antique Egypt: Christian Women Speak

This paper tells us how and what we can learn of the lives of ordinary Christian Women in Late Antique Egypt from our papyrological sources. Papyri, though ephemeral, give us specific instances, from which we can see how ordinary women used Scripture and prayed, and how too the Church authorities of the time became involved in cases of marital disharmony.

Voices from Late Antique Egypt

This paper tells us how and what we can learn of the lives of ordinary Christian Women in Late Antique Egypt from our papyrological sources. Papyri, though ephemeral, give us specific instances, from which we can see how ordinary women used Scripture and prayed, and how too the Church authorities of the time became involved in cases of marital disharmony.

A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire (review)

Reviewed by: A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire Clifford Ando A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire, David M. Gwynn, ed. Brill's Series on the Early Middle Ages, vol. 15. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2008. Pp. xv + 281, ISBN 978-9-004-16383-6 This volume is the product of a seminar held in Oxford in 2004 to mark the fortieth [End Page 197] anniversary of the publication of A.H.M. Jones' Later Roman Empire. Eight of its chapters were first delivered in that series; three others, as well as its Afterword, were solicited for the publication. As both contemporaneous reviews and the volume's contributors observe, The Later Roman Empire marked a watershed in scholarship on the period, and the assessment of its achievement and influence is an eminently worthwhile project. What brief do the authors set themselves, how well do they fulfill it, and how cogent does that project or projects appear? Leaving aside the Afterword by Wolf Liebeschuetz, the chapters divide into three groups: a biographical essay by Alexander Sarantis; historiographic studies by Peter Garnsey and Stefan Rebenich (the former on Jones' aims, sources, and method, the latter on his use of continental scholarship); and thematic investigations—on law, the role of the emperor, the army, and the like. These last may themselves be distinguished according to whether Jones understood himself to be surveying their field. As Caroline Humfress and David Gwynn, and not only they, both record, Jones explicitly eschewed a number of topics. His was a "social, economic and administrative survey": in consequence, Jones stated in the opening paragraph of his preface, "I ignore the two major intellectual achievements of the age, theology and law…." Thus where Michael Whitby can, in "The Role of the Emperor," assess Jones' work both in light of the standards and ambitions Jones set himself and also of the forms taken by subsequent inquiry in the field, Humfress and Gwynn have the rather different task of evaluating what modern historians can learn from Jones—indeed, also what Jones knew and wrote—in fields that he declined to address. Varieties of tone and emphasis notwithstanding, the thematic investigations exhibit considerable uniformity of structure, surveying first the landscape of scholarship prior to Jones; next Jones' own achievement and, where possible, his relationship to that earlier work; and finally an overview of work since 1964, whether autonomously understood or assessed as an index of Jones' influence, or both. The results are almost uniformly informative: published in an era that has witnessed an explosion of historiographic surveys of the field (not least in the first issue of this Journal), this volume can take its place among the more useful such surveys, for the reach of its bibliographies and the generosity of its tone. That said, the contributions do fulfill their remits in varied ways, and while this must up to a point follow upon the extraordinarily broad scope of the topics the authors were assigned, it is also a consequence of changes in the field underway even at the time Jones published his work. What is perhaps most signally lacking in the volume is any broader conception of changes in historical method writ large across the last forty years, and the relationship of British and more broadly Anglophone ancient history to these. That is to say, beyond hints that social and economic history simply yielded pride of place to religion, culture, and ceremonial, as if to a change in fashion, we are left with little sense of why the field changed; without arguments in that arena, my own sense is that we are left with a fairly narrow understanding of how it changed. [End Page 198] It is telling in this regard that so many of the contributors reflect on Jones' avowed avoidance of archaeological evidence: it is the uninterrogated assumption of the great majority of the contributors (Bryan Ward-Perkins and Averil Cameron are perhaps the two exceptions, albeit along different lines) that confronting archaeological data, or occasionally papyrological sources, would have forced Jones to different conclusions or, perhaps, a different sort of historical inquiry altogether. True this might be, but stated baldly it is pure fantasy...

Child Slaves at Work in Roman Antiquity

Making use of literary, legal, epigraphical and papyrological sources, this article aims at offering a comprehensive survey of instances of labour carried out by child slaves in Roman times. The evidence offered by archaeology, osteology and iconography is also taken into account. The child slaves’ jobs and tasks are categorized and the various cases are commented upon. In the end, it turns out that the subject is not only revelatory with regard to the living conditions of young slaves and concepts of slavery, but also the everyday reality of children and Roman concepts of childhood in general

Incest or Adoption? Brother-Sister Marriage in Roman Egypt Revisited

In JRS 97 Sabine Huebner argued that the brother-sister marriages in Roman Egypt could be explained as marriages between an adopted son and a natural daughter, a widespread family strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean. Remijsen and Clarysse now return to the traditional view that Egyptians did marry their full sisters. Ancient authors considered brother-sister marriages as a peculiarity of the whole Egyptian population and, moreover, papyrological sources do not prove any connection between adoption and brother-sister marriage. Neither the household size nor the onomastic pattern in families with brother-sister marriages are consistent with the usual adoption practices of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Expositi in the Community

Using legal, papyrological, and literary sources of the Roman imperial period, this paper looks at the fate of abandoned newborns (expositi) who were picked up and reared by someone other than a parent, usually for future use as slaves. Particular attention is given to the legal conflicts that ensued when, as sometimes happened, parents attempted to recover a child they had abandoned years before. The possibility of conflict was augmented by the peculiar characteristics of the Roman paternal power (patria potestas), which held that a paterfamilias (whether a birth father or a slavemaster) maintained legal power over children and slaves even after abandoning them.

The Justinianic plague: origins and effects

This article addresses the subject of the first well-attested outbreak of bubonic plague in the history of the Mediterranean world – the so-called ‘Justinianic Plague’ of the sixth century. The African origin of the disease is examined and contextualized, whilst recent revisionist arguments in relation to the scale of the depopulation caused by the plague are responded to with reference to the numismatic, legal, and papyrological sources. The numismatic evidence in particular points to a major crisis in imperial finances for which large-scale depopulation would be the most likely cause. The legal and papyrological sources record how both landowners and the imperial authorities responded to this situation.

A New Look at the Career of John Philoponus

While John Philoponus' (ca. 490-575) life and thought have been studied almost entirely in the context of the history of classical philosophy, this paper attempts to view his work as more closely connected to the social and cultural history of Byzantine Egypt as known from papyrological sources. Philoponus, a committed Egyptian Monophysite, chose particular philosophical texts and problems as objects of his work because they were the material of current Monophysite debate. His intention was to provide the nascent Coptic church with a powerful set of tools for argument, with which Egyptian Monophysites could defeat their Chalcedonian opponents.

Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture

Naphtali Lewis and Meyer Reinhold's Roman Civilization is a classic. Originally published by Columbia University Press in 1955, the authors have undertaken another revision which takes into account recent work in the field. These volumes consist of selected primary documents from ancient Rome, covering a range of over 1,000 years of Roman culture, from the foundation of the city to its sacking by the Goths.The selections cover a broad spectrum of Roman civilization, including literature, philosophy, religion, education, politics, military affairs, and economics. These English translations of literary, inscriptional, and papyrological sources, many of which are available nowhere else, create a mosaic of the brilliance, the beauty, and the power of Rome.

On the πύργoς as a Farm Building

In Hermes, LIV (1919), F. Preisigke discussed the term πύργoς, suggesting inter alia, that it bears the meaning of a “farm building” on the basis of papyrological sources. In the following year in the same journal, E. Meyer supported this contention, pointing out the suitability of such a meaning for such NT passages as Mark 12:1 = Matthew 21:33 (and, to a lesser extent, Luke 14:20). The discussion was succinctly summarized in Moulton and Milligan's Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, s.v. πύργoς.