Culture and Society in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Egypt

It is easy to allocate resources that exist in sufficient quantities to satisfy the needs of all of their users. If constant, unregulated use poses no danger to the supply or quality of a resource, there is little need to regulate access. The allocation of scarce resources, however, requires more care. If supplies are insufficient to satisfy every user’s desires, rules must be put in place to govern access and to resolve disputes. Still more difficult is the regulated allocation of resources whose supplies are unpredictable and variable.

P.Tebt. 2.302 records a petition sent by priests in Tebtunis in 71-2 AD to the prefect detailing their grievances surrounding an amount of temple land. In this document, a group of priests complain that the local komogrammateus has broken the terms of the agreement under which they worked a parcel of land in place of receiving a subvention from the state. When published in 1907 by Grenfell and Hunt, they noted that it “throws considerable light on the treatment of the temples by the State in the first century” (Grenfell and Hunt, Tebtunis Papyri, Vol.

Funerary literature in ancient Egypt was created primarily through scribal copying. However, the appearance of a new Demotic composition in the Roman Period contained features unaccounted for in assessments of the ways in which ancient writings were replicated.