The Roman Empire was an empire of cities. As urban culture spread, especially into the western provinces, it brought with it a more intensely documentary habit, meaning that the study of the Roman Empire after Augustus is distinguished by the vast increase in the documentary record. Fortuitous discoveries such as the Vindo-landa writing tablets, bits of bark preserved in a bog, that contain records from northern Britain, the Babatha archive from Judaea, and the third century documents emanating from Dura Europus and the nearby village of Appadana in Syria attest the spread of an increasingly documentary habit away from urban to rural centers (Bowman 1994; Feissel and Gascou 1995; Cotton 1995). These finds may be paralleled by the rise of the epigraphic habit in regions where public inscription had not been a feature of life previously.
The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the contributions that papyrologists and epigraphists make to the study of the Roman Empire, and to explore the methodological issues with which they deal. Both papyrologists and epigraphists have some issues in common since their material is documentary in the sense that it was not transmitted through the manuscript tradition, and that its primary function in antiquity was to provide a record of action rather than to entertain a reader (M. H. Hansen 2001: 322-4). That said, there are several fundamental distinctions between the evidence available from inscriptions and papyri. The first is that the former, by their very nature, are limited to only a handful of standardized types of documents meant for wider public display and government propaganda. The second is that inscriptions ordinarily represent the end of a process, or, in cases such as erasure or reuse, an implicit judgment on the relevance of an earlier process. Papyri, on the other hand, may record either completed or in-progress actions. They reveal horizontal and vertical interfaces of administrative operations, both between officials of similar rank and officials all the way through the multi-tiered system of the Roman imperial administration, from Alexandria down to the smallest administrative offices in the countryside. Papyri also offer a picture of everyday interactions outside the official sphere, while inscriptions will only record events that people wish to place on public display. In a word, whereas inscriptions provide a series of isolated, static and premeditated snapshots of concerns, papyri offer a more seamless, dynamic, and spontaneous sequence of interactions. Without papyri we would know something about imperial policy and the actions of the prefect of Egypt and his procurators, but little about the structure, levels, effectiveness, and daily operation of the Roman provincial administration, or how the people of Egypt perceived the system. That said, inscriptions and papyri should not be studied separately or in isolation; their greatest impact comes when they are studied in combination with other types of evidence, including coins and other remnants of material culture (Bowman 2001).
World History
