Neither Greeks nor Romans attempted to suppress the legal traditions of the peoples they governed. Ptolemy II provided courts (dikasteria) for the Greek settlers in the chora, in parallel with the Egyptian courts of the laokritai. A royal representative, eisagogeus (clerk of the court), was a key figure in the Greek courts, no less than in the Egyptian, and seems like other Ptolemaic functionaries to derive from both Greek and Egyptian precedents (Allam 1991, 2008; cf. Ch. 12 end). The city of Alexandria possessed its own legal system and courts (but the archidikastes, ‘‘chief of justice,’’ was a royal appointee: Fraser 1972: 107-115). Alexandrian laws differed in some details from the Greek law of the chora and are poorly documented (mainly from a single papyrus, P. Hal. I; see Sel. Pap. II201-2). The community of Jews settled in Egypt was also free to apply its own law, as is now well illustrated by a group of texts from the Herakleopolite nome published in 2001 (P. Polit. Jud.), but there was no barrier to Jews or Egyptians also using the Greek courts, if they chose, and even vice versa.
A case between two persons of Jewish descent, in fact, provides some of our best evidence for the working of the Greek courts. This cites a royal edict directing the courts to make their judgement in accordance with any relevant royal decree; or, failing that, to follow the city laws (politikoi nomoi: it is disputed whether this refers to the litigants’ origins in the cities of old Greece, or to Alexandria, Ptolemais, and Naukratis, the Greek cities in Egypt); or otherwise, to judge according to the most equitable view (Sel. Pap. II 256 = P. Gurob 2). Until recently the dikasteria were thought to have become obsolete by the end of the third century, but newly published documents show them still working through the 170s at least (P. Heid. YIII 412-17, with pp. 3-9). However, after the originally peripatetic royal judges, the chrematistai, became permanently based throughout the chora in the late third century, they soon supplanted the dikasteria as the main recourse for Greek litigation.
Many hundreds of private legal documents, both Egyptian and Greek, survive on papyrus. One important group is part of a register, probably from a notary’s office, containing copies of Greek wills, mostly of military settlers, from the Arsinoite nome between 238 and 226 bc (P. Petrie21). From these and other texts such as sales, leases, and loans, scholars can trace developments in the forms of Greek legal documents in the Hellenistic Period (Rupprecht 1994: 94-153, 2005). For most transactions, individuals did not need to involve a public notary, drawing up agreements privately as ‘‘six-witness documents’’ or cheirographa (‘‘hand-written agreements’’); even a purely oral contract was legally valid. Nevertheless, particularly once the system of official notaries ( agoranomoi) was formalized around the end of the third century, parties commonly chose the added security ofa notarial document, or at least publicly registered their private legal documents (Gagarin 2008: 237 attributes this increased use of writing to influence from Egyptian scribal practice).
Several archives of Egyptian family papers have been found, some actually in the jars where the families kept them (Totoes from Thebes; probably Horos son of Nekhoutes; references for these and other archives in Depauw 1997: 154-8). That documents such as marriage agreements or divisions of parental property were actually produced in court is shown by the verbatim record of a case before the laokritai at Assiut in 170 bc, in which a woman, Chratianch, asserted a claim against her husband’s half-brother Tefhape, over some land devolving from their father (P. BM 10591 in Thompson 1934: 12-33; Tefhape won the case). While the earliest Ptolemaic archives are entirely in Demotic, the later ones are bilingual, reflecting the increasingly complex social and ethnic mix of communities, even in the Thebaid; the same individual might use an Egyptian or Greek document depending on the particular requirement - for instance, Egyptian marriage documents offered greater protection to the wife. This ethnic complexity lies behind the much-discussed clause in the royal decree of 118 bc, which (whatever its exact wording - Menches’ copy seems defective) provided that the language of the contract, rather than ethnic identity - which might be ambiguous -, should determine whether a case was dealt with by the chrematistai or laokritai (P. Tebt. I 5, ll.207-20; Meleze-Modrzejewski 1975; Pestman 1985b). Despite this ruling the tendency for Greek to gain ground at the expense of Egyptian in legal documents, encouraged by the requirement for all Demotic contracts to have a summary in Greek and be registered in the public record-office (from 146 bc, Pestman 1985a), persisted through to, and beyond, the end of the Ptolemaic Period. Direct evidence for the functioning of the laokritai ceases at the end ofthe second century, although they possibly still existed early in the Roman Period (Allam 1991: 126).
World History
