Ancient Egypt Documentary | Administration and Law: Graeco-Roman – Part 01

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The many thousands of papyri and ostraca surviving from this period, which are predominantly of routine administrative or legal content, allow us insight into the detailed working of the administrative and legal systems of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt unparalleled by comparison both with earlier Egyptian history and with other parts of the Hellenistic and Roman world. During the Ptolemaic Period, both Demotic and Greek were regularly used for administrative and legal documents, although the Demotic texts are only recently being accorded their full weight alongside the Greek in historical studies. The tendency for Greek to gain ground at the expense of Demotic for documentary use, already noticeable by the later Ptolemaic Period, accelerated sharply under Roman rule, so that our evidence for administration and law in the Roman Period is very largely written in Greek.

It is, however, not easy to form a balanced overall picture of how the administration and law operated, because the evidence is so patchy, being intensively concentrated in a few locations, and even there documenting only some specific procedures over a short time-span. Most of our evidence comes from the Fayum and parts of what the Roman administration termed the ‘‘Heptanomia,’’ the Nile valley nomes from the Hermopolite northwards. The Thebaid is reasonably well documented for the Ptolemaic Period, much less so for the Roman and Late Roman Period, while the Delta, because of its high water table, has yielded only a few carbonized papyri. In particular, little papyrological evidence directly relates to Alexandria, which throughout the period under discussion here was the center of government, as well as much the largest city in Egypt. Our perspective on the central government and administration is, therefore, necessarily somewhat tangential and indirect.

00:00 Context
04:58 The Evolution of Ptolemaic Administration

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