It is now some 30 years since Alan Bowman made a powerful case for the role of papyrology in understanding Roman history beyond the boundaries of Egypt, as well as within its confines (Bowman 1976, 2001). Since then historians of all sorts have increasingly come to realize the significance of papyri for the study of the Roman Empire at large, and have attempted to make the Egyptian evidence more pertinent to Roman historiography (Bagnall 1995), while, at the same time, refining our understanding of Roman institutions and administration in Egypt itself (J. D. Thomas 2001).
The first problem that both sorts of historians have had to face is the fact that the clandestine activities of Egyptian farmers and antiquities dealers removed ancient artifacts from their immediate physical, associative context, meaning that most papyri in modern collections are disembodied objects. Those discovered during scientific archaeological excavations that can be studied in their original context are, unfortunately, a minority. The result is that we have very few archives that were assembled by their original, ancient owner(s). In response, papyrologists have been struggling to cluster papyri temporally and spatially on the basis of internal information such as date, place of origin, and prosopography. In some cases they have succeeded in reconstructing modern ‘‘dossiers’’ that once may have belonged to a particular individual (on the issue of modern ‘‘dossier’’ versus ancient ‘‘archive,’’ see A. Martin 1992; above, section 1). For convenience and accuracy, the term ‘‘dossier’’ will be used throughout this discussion, except for cases where the term ‘‘archive’’ can be used indisputably.
The most reliable historical information about the middle and lower levels of the Roman administration of Egypt comes from groups of closely interrelated documents, ranging in size from just a dozen to several hundred texts. (Montevecchi 1988: 248-61, 575-8, lists 135 so-called ‘‘archives,’’ dating from the Ptolemaic to the Byzantine period, but most of them are in fact ‘‘dossiers.’’) Surviving ‘‘dossiers’’ regularly focus on an individual or a family, rarely on an office. As expected, no government or state ‘‘archive’’ from Alexandria has survived, but rather ‘‘dossiers’’ of middle and low ranking officials as well as wealthy individuals from communities of the countryside. This category of ‘‘dossiers’’ is important for the study of imperial administration because of its mixed nature, containing not only private documents (e. g. private correspondence), but also texts that show the individual and his family acting in the public sphere either with other private individuals (e. g. loans and leases) or with representatives of the government (e. g. petitions, applications). In fact, very often members of these upper crust families in the countryside were intricately involved in the local government. That said, the information of individual, ‘‘non-dossier’’ documents should not be undervalued.
These texts range from trivial lists of expenses or objects to prefectural decrees and imperial legislation. To a large degree, isolated documents provide much of what we know about the higher levels of the central administration (Bagnall 1995: 33-40).
World History
