Culture and Society in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Egypt (organized by the American Society of Papyrologists)

In this report we will discuss the results and interpretation of three related and recently completed studies: (1) a Raman study of 17 papyri from Egypt, spanning the 4th cent. BCE to the 10 cent. CE; (2) a Raman study of the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” and the Gospel of John, both the subjects of heated debate with respect to provenance, date, and authenticity; and (3) a scanning electron microscope study of the morphology of ink particles on papyri and ink pots or wells from Karanis in the Kelsey Museum at the University of Michigan.

Amongst the many liturgies of Roman Egypt catalogued by Naphtali Lewis, various ‘receivers’ (παραλῆμπται) were tasked with the collection of goods and services from the communities. The requisition of these goods and services most frequently took the form of compulsory purchase between the customer (the Roman administration or military) and the manufacturers, a practice perhaps based on Republican or Ptolemaic precedents. As regards the procuration of vestis militaris, documentary evidence derives from the second century (Sheridan, esp. pp.

Sealing and labeling containers constituted important steps in the distribution of commodities in the ancient world. This paper presents implements for these activities that have been exceptionally preserved in the archaeological record: wooden stamps. In addition to the corpus of c. 26,000 papyri, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt’s 1899/1900 excavations of Tebtunis yielded nearly two thousand artifacts, all of which are currently housed in the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Fragments from a carbonized papyrus scroll are kept in a non-descript confectioner’s box at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo. No inventory number is assigned to this papyrus. The scroll is believed to be one of those found by Naville at Tell Timai (ancient Thmouis) in the Nile Delta during 1892/1893 excavations.

The recent proliferation of published documents (in both Greek and Demotic) concerning the temples of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt has now made it possible to study the administration and oversight of these institutions in a meaningful and theoretically informed fashion (as Chauffray or Monson). The key administrative role in these periods was that of the lesonis, a position that was held by one priest at a time in the Ptolemaic period, but which was held jointly under the Romans.

The Theognostos Archive (see P. J. Sijpesteijn, “Theognostos alias Moros and His Family,” ZPE 76, 1989, 213–218, and the introduction to P.Bagnall 56) is a set of documents from Hermopolis in Middle Egypt from the late second and early third century. The “membership card” of the imperial organization of athletes once belonging to Hermeinos, an older brother of Theognostos, is the best known (Pap.Agon. 6).