Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

CHAPTER 21c
EGYPT
james g. keenan
By the year 425, Egypt had achieved a provincial arrangement that would
last for well over a century. 1 A single province under the principate, it had
come under Diocletian to be divided into three smaller provinces. It all
began in the last decade of the third century when a new province of
Thebaid, coterminous with the old Theban epistrategia, was created out of
the southern part of the original province of Egypt (Aegyptus); subse-
1 Literary and legal notices for the history of Egypt after 425 are scattered; some will be found in
the text and notes below. A text of Justinian’s Edict xiii is included in Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol.iii
(Novellae), 6th edn, by R. Schoell and W. Kroll (Berlin 1954), 780–95. The fourth-century record of
monastic traditions, preserved in Greek, Latin and Coptic texts, yields in the fifth century to the Coptic
writings of Shenoute and Besa. What is unique about Egypt, in this as in other periods, is its wealth of
documentary evidence preserved on papyrus. Any account of Egypt must rely heavily on this. The
years 425–600 are represented by a few papyri in Latin and Coptic, by a great number in Greek, some
from the fifth century, but most from the sixth. Important editions include: P.Monac. (revised as
P.Münch.), P.Lond. v.1722–37 (for Syene’s Patermuthis archive); P.Cair.Masp. i,iii, P.Lond. v, P.Flor. iii
279–342, P.Mich. xiii, P.Michael. 40–60 (for Aphrodito); BGU xii, P.Herm. (for Hermopolis); P.Oxy. i
and xvi, and PSI viii (for Oxyrhynchus); Stud.Pal. iii, viii, xx, SB, especially vol. i, BGU (passim), and
some volumes in the CPR series, most recently x and xiv (for the Fayum). Papyri from these and other
editions are cited according to the conventions set out in J. F. Oates, R. S. Bagnall, W. H. Willis and K.
A. Worp, Checklist of Editions of Greek and Latin Papyri, Ostraca and Tablets 4th edn (Bulletin of the American
Society of Papyrologists Suppl. 7: Atlanta, GA, 1992).
The papyrus evidence, despite its richness, has its limitations. One is that it derives from a limited
number of sites, none of which can be taken as typical of Egypt as a whole. The most important of
these are (from south to north): Syene, Aphrodito, Hermopolis, Oxyrhynchus and the Fayum
(Arsinoite nome). Of these, Oxyrhynchus has drawn the most scholarly attention, the Fayum (the state
of whose documentation is improving, but still in great disarray) the least.
Besides its geographical spottiness, the papyrus evidence is limited in other, equally important ways.
The papyri mostly concern local and regional, rarely imperial events. The plague of 542, for example,
extensively described in Procopius (Wars ii.22–3), finds but one obscure and probably figurative allusion
in the papyri (P.Cair.Masp. iii 67283 with ed. intro.). When papyri do refer to seemingly important
events, it is necessary to resort to speculation in seeking their ‘fit’ into the larger imperial scheme. See,
for example, Maehler (1976). Similar, though probably more successful, have been efforts to find the
‘fit’ between the documentary papyri and the late imperial law codes (esp. C.Th., CJ, Just. Nov.), though
see the remarks of A. H. M. Jones, JHS 71 (1951) 271, on how hard it is ‘to weave together the bits and
patches of the papyri with the tangled skein of the Codes and Novels’.
For bibliographical guidance beyond what is provided here, see A. Bataille, Les papyrus (Paris 1955:
Traité d’études byzantines ii); O. Montevecchi, La papirologia, 2nd edn (Milan 1988), pt 4, esp. 259–61,
578 (for papyrus archives); H.-A. Rupprecht, Kleine Einführung in die Papyruskunde (Darmstadt 1994),
passim. My thanks to Terry G. Wilfong for the map that locates places mentioned in this discussion and
for advice on Coptic and other late sources.
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