Family, Law, and Society in Roman and Late Antique Egypt

It has been over a century since the initial excavations of Grenfell and Hunt at Oxyrhynchus unearthed thousands of literary and documentary texts that have revolutionized our understanding of the society and culture of the ancient world. Yet despite such abundant documentation in Greek, Latin, Coptic, Demotic and, for later periods, Arabic, Egypt continues to be excluded from comprehensive treatments of Roman and Late Antique society. Egypt’s perceived “special status” has caused it to be judged inadequately or insufficiently relevant to the wider discussion of Roman and Late Antique society. Building on the descriptions of authors from Strabo to Ammianus Marcellinus, many scholars have perpetuated the image of Egypt as a lawless, ungovernable place at the margins of the Roman world, coloring the histories of the region and the period still further. Much has been done recently to bring Egypt and Egyptian evidence back into larger discussions of the Roman Empire, particularly in the Late Antique period, thanks to the publication of Roger Bagnall’s masterly Egypt in Late Antiquity. Nonetheless, a more detailed discussion of Egyptian society integrating the various strands of Greek and Roman literary evidence, documentary papyri, inscriptions, and Coptic or Demotic material is still needed.

The proposed panel seeks to examine a variety of issues that stand at the intersection between legal institutions, families and society at large, during the Roman and late antique period (1^st-7^th centuries CE). The abundance of legal documentation form this period provides social historians with a rich archive for testing hypotheses about the function of the law in day-to-day life in Egypt, and confronting with greater nuance the larger question of how individuals perceived legal institutions and administration. It is apparent that the average person living in Egypt would, at some point in their lives, deal with local or imperial legal authorities, whether complaining about some form of real or perceived injustice, in the course of conducting business or dividing up property. The evidence shows that individuals were asked to work with legal authorities on their own behalf, on behalf of their families, or at times on behalf of professional organizations and associations. Sometimes this process went smoothly, at other times it engendered conflict. Under what circumstances these conflicts and disputes occurred, how they may have been resolved, and how people represented themselves in the process are the questions at the heart of this panel. The panel assembles a group of historians, classicists, papyrologists, and Egyptologists who bring their varying expertise and perspectives to a discussion of questions related to the family, law, and society in Roman and Late Antique Egypt.

The proposed papers will cover a number of different topics. One will investigate conflicts within the family, and discuss the interaction between the socially disadvantaged (minors and orphans) and the legal system in Roman Egypt. Another will address conflict outside of the family, specifically violent conflict, and the manner in which these conflicts were presented to legal authorities in Late Antiquity. Another paper will address the question of the change and development of the legal system in Roman Egypt from Ptolemaic precedents, specifically addressing the question of resistance to change. One contribution will investigate the relationship between families, guilds, and the local economy. A final paper will address questions of gender and the family in the town of Jeme in Late Antiquity.