In fact, though, if we want to read ordinary women’s letters from antiquity, it is not impossible. They may not be written in full by the women’s own hands - people usually employed scribes - but the letters are sometimes signed by women, or incorporate postscripts written by women. And we have these precious ephemeral texts from far-flung parts of the ancient world, from the Roman frontier fort of Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall (Bowman 2003) to the deserts of Egypt, which are probably the single largest source of knowledge about the everyday lives of real ancient women. Jane Rowlandson’s sourcebook gathers papyrus letters together with all kinds of documents and material evidence (1998). Roger Bagnall and Raffaella Cribiore collect all the letters known to have been written by women, including a number of family archives, starting in 300 bc in Greek and Demotic Egyptian and continuing through the appearance of letters in Coptic up to the eighth century AD (2005). Lamp-post strategy: Bagnall and Cribiore use family archives from late medieval England as a basis for comparison (2005: 25-32), exploring these more complete family dossiers to get an idea of what a full picture could look like. This collection stands as a reminder of what a truly polyglot, multicultural world the ancient Mediterranean was. Ruled by Rome for much of the period covered, these writers communicated in Greek and Egyptian with Latin trimmings, often bearing double or hybrid names to suit their context. Although it is hard to know much about rural areas in antiquity, we can be sure that cities shared widely in this feature of Egyptian life, and that we should never imagine “Greek women” or “Roman women” as homogeneous entities (on papyrology, Bowman, papyrology).
World History
