Literary and Documentary Reflections on Mawālī and the Origins of the Islamic Patronate in Umayyad Egypt
By Paul Ulishney, University of Oxford
This paper explores the problems associated with the sudden appearance of mawālī (“clients,” Ar. root walāʾ, “clientage, patronage”) in early Islamic Greek papyri of the late seventh and eighth centuries CE. This otherwise unprecedented Greek title (μαυλεύς) appears in the 680s under the Marwānid governor ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 685-705), above all in the correspondences of the governor Qurra b. Ishak in the so-called Basileios Archive (P. Lond. IV, see Bell).
Open Sesame? The Vegetable Oil Industry from the Ptolemies to the Romans
By Nico Dogaer, Belgian American Educational Foundation
The papyri of Graeco-Roman Egypt present us with invaluable opportunities to study institutional change in the ancient world. Traditionally, a dirigiste and interventionist Ptolemaic state is contrasted with a policy of privatization and laissez faire under the Romans (Rathbone 2000). This paper explores these dynamics through the vital vegetable oil industry (sesame, castor, olive, and radish), as the so-called ‘oil monopoly’ introduced by the early Ptolemies represents the most extreme example of state intervention known for the Graeco-Roman period (Bingen 1978; Dogaer 2021).
On Nascent Nomes and Nebulous Nomarchs
By Joe Morgan, Yale University
In this talk, I posit a new framework for conceptualizing the development of the royal administration of Egypt in the early Third Century BCE that foregrounds local agency in institutional change and resolves a long-standing crux in the historiography of the Early Ptolemaic Period.
Intertextuality between Compilation and Application: A Demotic Spell for Compulsion and the So-Called Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies
By Foy Scalf, University of Chicago
This paper will argue for the close intertextual relationship between manuscripts of applied magic and the compiled handbooks now known as the Greco-Egyptian magical formularies (Love 2016; Faraone and Torallas Tovar 2022a; Faraone and Torallas Tovar 2022b; Kyrianos Database). Such intertextuality has long been recognized, but this paper will focus on the forthcoming edition of an incompletely published papyrus with a Demotic spell for compulsion that represents a relatively rare example in Demotic of a single-sheet manuscript used in practical application.
Paideia among the Orphans in Roman Egypt: The Case of P.Mich. IX 532
By Yuecheng “Russell” Li, Princeton University
This paper analyzes the potential extent of dialogue between P.Mich. IX 532 (inv. 5791, 181/182 CE), a document on the education of orphans, and the wider cultural discourse on paideia, apaideusia, and orphania in the “second sophistic”. Scholarship on this papyrus has noted its unusual titulature, puzzling subscription, insight into legal issues of fatherlessness, apprenticeship, and public funds for children, and archaeological context (Husselman 1971, Wolff 1974, Parsons 1974, Sijpesteijn 1982, Bergamasco 2006, van Minnen 2008).
Who Will Pay Child Support? Divorce, Roman Citizenship, and a New Latin Papyrus
By Giuliano Sidro, University of California, Berkeley
In Rome, divorce was not less frequent than it is today. Indeed, it may have been even more frequent, at least in the higher echelons of society, where remarriages could play a political role (Bradley 1991, Treggiari 1991a, and Corbier 1991). Though the political machinations of the imperial center were largely absent from Egypt, the situation there clearly did not differ much, given what private letters, petitions, and most of all census returns reveal about the fates of the province’s marriages (Bagnall and Frier 1994, Huebner 2013). But what would exactly happen upon divorce?