The Aphrodite Papyri and Village Life in Byzantine Egypt

The nearly one thousand years during which Egypt was characterized by a Greek-speaking elite have by papyrologists and historians traditional;y been divided into three periods: the Ptolemaic, which marks its beginning with Alexander’s invasion in 332 B.C.; the Roman, which begins with Octavian’s reduction of Alexandria in 30 B.C.; and the Byzantine, which starts with Diocleatian’s accession in A.D. 284 and ends with the Arab invasion of A.D. 639. The Greek papyri recovered from ancient Egypt’s cemeteries and waste heaps, whether by supervised excavations or by the less formal ‘excavations’ of the sebakh-diggers, especially toward the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, have made Egypt the best-known region of the Hellenistic, Roman and early Byzantine world. The evidence is not without its gaps, chronological and geographical, and only a small proportion of the papyri consists of pieces whose texts can stand on their own as important historical testimonia. Nevertheless, to cite just a few salient examples, the Greek papyri of the Ptolemaic period have produced copies of royal regulations, revenue laws and amnesty decrees, and documents on important land-reclamation projects in the Fayum. Shortly over a decade ago, a Cologne papyrus of the Roman period proved to contain a fragmentary Greek version of the emperor Augustus’ funeral oration for his second-in-command, Marcus Agrippa. Byzantine-period papyri have produced references to some of Justinian’s laws and practical examples of the working of legal rules and procedures whose theoretical outlines are set forth in the codes.