Federico Morelli, L’ archivio di Senouthios anystes e testi connessi. Lettere e documenti per la costruzione di una capitale

This is the first of two projected volumes whose purpose is to gather together, reassemble, select, and present Greek documents from the GreekCoptic archive of the notarios Senouthios, anystes of the northern skelos of the Hermopolite nome just after the Arab conquest. Most of the 32 documents in this volume are assigned by prosopographical associations, subject matter, and so on (“diversi elementi”) to ca. 643/4, based on a pivotal second indiction (see Introduzione, pp. 22-27), in other words, on the very cusp of the new Arab administration. The papyri are all Viennese. They are also all Hermopolite in provenance, but after they had been purchased and come to Vienna they were mistakenly thought to have originated, like so many other papyri on the market in the 1880s, from the first and second “Fayyum Finds.” A riveting section of the Introduzione (“L’archivio: tentativo di una storia,” pp. 2-9) reconstructs how this happened. The papyri are from a period until now underrepresented in the documentary record. One may compare what was available thirty-plus years ago as presented in P.M. Fraser’s “Additional Bibliography” to A.J. Butler, The Arab Conquest of Egypt(reprint 1978), with the recent surveys by S.J. Clackson, P.M. Sijpesteijn, and T.S. Richter in A. Papaconstantinou (ed.), The Multilingual Experience in Egypt, from the Ptolemies to the Abbassids (2010).1 Not only has the material – Greek, Coptic, Arabic, even Pahlevi – increased; it is now better organized and for that reason more accessible.