THE ESTATE ACCOUNTS: DEFINITION AND NATURE OF THE DOCUMENTS

By far the most informative of the documents found amongst the Apion papyri are the general estate accounts, or, as the documents most often describe themselves, ‘accounts of receipts and of items of expenditure’. Certain of these survive papyrologically in a relatively undamaged form, of which four have been published. Many more documents exist which represent either fragments of such accounts, or accounts relating to the collection and disbursement of a single product, such as wine produced on the family estates. It is from the first body, the relatively undamaged sets of general accounts, that we may derive a concrete sense of the overall structure of the Apion estates in the vicinity of Oxyrhynchus. Between them, the published general accounts describe life on different parts of the Apion family's landholdings over some thirty-four years, from c. 556 to 590.

Given the length of time over which these documents were drafted, the Apion general statements of account conform to a strikingly uniform pattern. All four documents represent annual accounts for primarily rural properties drafted by individuals bearing the title of pronoetes (προνοητής). In three out of the four cases, the accounts are structured around settlements described as epoikia (ἐποίκια), although, as will be seen shortly, P.Oxy. XVIII 2195 differs somewhat in this respect. Each set of accounts typically covers six or seven such localities.