Law and society in Ptolemaic, Roman and late antique Egypt
This project, under contract with Cambridge University Press, is being edited jointly with JG Keenan (Loyola University of Chicago), and U. Yiftach-Firanko, (Hebrew University, Jerusalem). Some thirty contributors from around the world are contributing text translations and legal analysis of key legal documents from this richly documented legal tradition.

We propose in this book to treat the documentary (mainly papyrological) legal sources from Egypt from the Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine periods. Our focus is the judicial system from the viewpoint of the legal document. It first treats diplomacy in general: types of documents, preservation, archives, witnesses, etc. It then focuses on the objects, or to be more precise, the areas of private law covered by the documents: family, labor, capital and land. The choice is surely arbitrary, forcing us to omit many topics. It is also to some extent problematic. To give one example: there is no legal obligation to use wills for the transmission of property within one's family. Hence, examining wills under the heading of 'family' could be misleading. Still, there is almost no case where testators in their wills disinherit their own immediate family members for the benefit of outsiders. In other words, in practice the will was a legal instrument put into use almost exclusively within the framework of the family. Finally, there is not much sense of dealing with legal documents if we cannot demonstrate the purpose for which they were drawn. This is, we believe, to support one's case in event of a legal challenge within the framework of the judicial system. Chapter 8 is thus an introduction to chapter 9: it introduces the reader to the structure of the judicial system in all three periods, in chapter 9 we show how the documents worked within that system.

This book is not merely a collection of sources in translation. Put in broader terms, it is to be a major contribution to the study of comparative law. The documents from Egypt, covering six major legal traditions (ancient Egyptian, demotic, Coptic, Greek, Roman, and Aramaic), form the richest corpus of texts through which it is possible to discuss the interaction of different legal traditions as well as the evolution of legal institutions over the course of more than a thousand years. (The closest comparison is the documentation from Tokugawa Japan.) But the law of the papyri has been generally treated in isolation and so our aim is to bring this valuable documentary material fully into the general context of ancient law and legal history. We believe that ancient law will be an important topic among economic, legal and ancient historians in the coming years, on analogy with the historical turn among Economists. But in contrast to Roman law, which in most cases is analyzed from the point of view of the normative, jurisprudential, even sometimes theoretical, literature, the documents from Egypt are concerned with the actual practice of law, law on the ground.

We will present the material in a fresh way that will allow the reader to get both an idea of the richness of the papyrological material and a sense of the state of the field: What do the texts look like? What are the main issues? What are the interpretive problems? We want this book to bridge the intellectual gap between lawyers, papyrologists, philologists and ancient historians on one hand, and the gap between pre-Roman legal traditions in the Mediterranean and Roman law on the other.

There will be two components of the book. First, we will provide accurate, up-to-date translations and legal commentary on key texts, illustrating the themes we have developed (forms of documents, personal status, the structure of the judicial system and justice in practice). Second, we shall provide an overall legal analysis of that theme, discussing the relationships and reconnections between the legal traditions (e.g. the law of the Greek versus the demotic Egyptian papyri on the subject of property rights). We shall also discuss the major interpretative and socio-economic issues that are raised by these texts.

Work on Papyri
I am engaged in the publication of a group of important texts written in Greek and in demotic Egyptian in the possession of the Classics Department at Stanford (P. Stan. Class.). They are dated to ca. 200 BC. I have presented papers about these texts at three international meetings (Brussels, Vienna, Würzburg), and, together with Professor Willy Clarysse (Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven), have already produced transcriptions of the documents. For some basic information on these texts, see the Papyrus Collections Worldwide web page: http://lhpc.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/collections/sample_coll.php?id=319.

Through a grant funded by the APIS project, phase IV, National Endowment for the Humanities, we now have excellent archival digital photos of each text, and through the excellent offices of Professor Todd Hickey, Berkeley, and his staff, all of the papyri are now well mounted and conserved. Information about them is now available, on the national website of the project. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/projects/digital/apis/index.html.

This important task was accomplished by Ms. Christelle Fischer and Mr. Andy Monson, both PhD students in the Department of Classics at Stanford. These papyri are important not only because they shed light on the administration of a Ptolemaic village in the Fayyum and its records office, but also because they are related to a much larger find of papyri now under study in several major papyri collections in the US and in Europe.

Stanford has received additional funds as part of Phase V of the APIS project to now catalogue and conserve the University library collection of Greek, demotic, Coptic and Arabic papyri. The bulk of this work will take place in the Fall of 2006.

I continue also to work on some demotic papyri from the Fayyum in the collection of the University of California at Berkeley.