Culture and Society in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Egypt

This paper examines the corpus of twenty-five Greek marriage documents from the Ptolemaic period in light of contemporary Egyptian marital instruments and the wider context of Greeks living in Hellenistic Egypt. Whilst Uri Yiftach-Firanko (2003) has discussed the mechanics of the legal type and its development into the Roman period, most scholarly interest focuses on the position of women within these documents. Certain elements seem strikingly empowering.

A Material Study of the Scribe X Papyri: Demotic in Kalamos Pen in the Late Ptolemaic Grapheion at Theogonis

Most documents from the Roman World which record the manumission of an enslaved person give little indication of what motivated the enslaver to free that person. Typically, non-literary accounts of manumission were tersely legalistic, recording only the most necessary information and leaving the historian to piece together relationships and background information.

This presentation aims to study the influence of professional association regulations on monastic rules in Byzantine Egypt. While writing my Ph.D. thesis, I noticed similarities between these two kinds of texts that deserve a closer examination.

In 634 armies of the Rashidun Caliphate invaded Egypt under the commandment of general ‘Amr b. al-‘Āṣ; six years later, they conquered Alexandria, and new stage in the country’s history began. The first centuries of the Arab rule in Egypt are characterized by both continuity and innovation in the cultural, economic, and social spheres.

What we call the “Coptic Wizard’s Hoard” is a library of ancient magical texts comprising at least twelve manuscripts and produced by five individuals at some point between the fourth and seventh centuries. This collection, which provides a rare glimpse into the activities of an ancient “magical workshop”, contains a codex written by three different scribes (P.Mich.inv. 593; published by W.H. Worrell, “A Coptic Wizard’s Hoard”, AJSL 46 [1930] 239–62), three rolls written by a fourth scribe, and eight papyrus sheets on which a fifth scribe copied spells from both the codex and the rolls.

I shall present a small portion of my dissertation, which examines the wide-ranging effects on families when one or more members left home to work in another town or village, or even another country. The papyri provide evidence for a variety of arrangements where people of all ages left home for work, ranging from young children leaving their parents and siblings to work as apprentices or on agricultural labour contracts, to the head of the household leaving to serve in government positions or the military.

This paper explores the interface between climate science and the documentary record of Ptolemaic Egypt. The appearance of several monographs (e.g. Cline 2014, Harper 2017, Manning 2018), articles (Bresson 2014, Knapp and Manning 2016), as well as collaborations (Princeton’s CCHRI, the PACES project, the Yale Nile Initiative, the Basel Climate Science and Ancient History Lab) in recent years have demonstrated the uses of cutting edge climatological datasets in the writing of ancient history.

This paper will present an overview of the unpublished Demotic medical texts in the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection, currently being edited for publication by the author. The corpus comprises the largest collection worldwide of Egyptian (Demotic) medical texts from the Graeco-Roman period, deriving from the well-documented Tebtunis Temple Library in the Fayum Oasis. This known archaeological context is unique amongst medical papyri from Egypt and the corpus affords multiple opportunities for research in largely unexplored avenues of ancient medicine.

In the Roman empire, marriage was a pivotal institution that determined the transmission of personal status and of family property to the children. When Rome increased its hold over individuals who, up till then, had used their own legal system, its new subjects articulated claims to make use of their own laws and the Roman law as well. This gave rise to various reactions from the Roman authorities.