The study of ancient law has blossomed in recent years. In the English language alone there have been dozens of monograph-length studies devoted to classical Greek and Roman law, to the Roman legal codes, and to the legal traditions of the ancient Near East including ancient Egyptian, biblical, and Coptic law, among many other topics. In 1995, an important conference was held at the University of California at Berkeley’s law school (Boalt Hall) that brought together specialists in ancient legal documents and legal historians (Chicago-Kent Law Review 70–71 [1995]). Among the many important outcomes of that conference, two stand out. The first was the realization that ancient legal sources have value outside of the realm of those who specialize in the language and scripts of the ancient texts themselves. The second, and more immediately important, outcome for this volume was that pre-Roman legal systems could and indeed should be studied out from under the shadow of Roman law.

Legal documents written on papyrus began to be published in some abundance by the end of the nineteenth century – not of course in time to be used by Henry Maine in his great Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (1861). Even after a substantial history of publication down to the present time, however, legal papyri have not received due attention from legal historians, and have only gradually been incorporated into broader synthetic work. The legal papyri remain by and large in their own world although that world has now expanded beyond the Nile River valley. The legal texts from Egypt, taken as a whole, are among the most valuable records from antiquity for the study of the ancient law, the ancient economy, and for social history more broadly. But that greater value of the papyri has often been lost in the technical occupation of publishing and correcting and commenting on an ever-growing corpus of documents. The papyri are the raw material of history and the basis of institutional analysis, but the underlying questions, often unstated and problematic, usually center around questions like: what kind of history, and whose? This in turn relates to the bigger question of the presumptive status of Egypt in the Hellenistic and Roman periods as a place “set apart,” and therefore easily dismissed as merely an unusual, if embarrassingly well-documented, part of the Mediterranean world.

This book is in part an abbreviation, rethinking, updating and re-orientation of Schwartz 2001. If it is unusually argumentative for a Key Themes book, that is because the topic demands, I would argue, an argumentative rather than a magisterial style, but it is far less argumentative than its remote source. It is more concerned to present a historical narrative, as far as possible, and to give full accounts of various issues in political history, especially the Jewish rebellions of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, which were given short shrift in the earlier book. I have also made an effort to summarize the most relevant new archaeology of the past decade. Most bibliographical items cited in The Ancient Jews were published after 2000.

I could not have written this book without a year of leave, in 2012–13, a semester of which I owe to the happy arrival in May, 2012, of Jonah Margolin-Schwartz. I owe the rest to the goodwill and ingenuity of Mark Mazower and Margaret Edsall. I thank René Bloch for his comments on Chapter 2 and Beth Berkowitz for her comments on Chapters 5 and 7, though neither is responsible for any remaining defects. I derived immense benefit from numerous e-mail exchanges with Hannah Cotton; Walter Ameling and John Ma gave me important advice about Hellenistic Jerusalem, and John sent me in addition some not yet published papers which contain the most original ideas about the background of the Maccabean Revolt since Bickermann’s. I am likewise grateful to Gil Gambash for sending me his manuscript on the British and Jewish revolts against Rome. My gratitude to Peter Garnsey and Paul Cartledge for their good-humoured encouragement and support should go without saying. Paul’s editorial interventions were an education in themselves. Michael Sharp, the editor for Cambridge University Press, has been unfailingly kind and helpful. The emotional roller-coaster ride of parenthood has finally distracted me, now and then, from history (though it has, alas, completely deprived me of television, too), and for that I thank the aforementioned Jonah, his big sister Ayelet, and Judy. With any luck by the time I finish the next book I’ll have the TV back.

EVENTS

Like Chapter 5, this chapter analyses the impact on the Jews of a relatively well-understood historical process. Here as there, the analysis is hindered by our nearly complete inability to reconstruct a narrative history of the Jews. Though late antique Jews, unlike their immediate ancestors, left behind abundant physical and literary remains, there is even less historiography stricto sensu than before: in fact there is none, whether Jewish or pagan or Christian, historiography having now been replaced by chronography, saints’ lives, apocalypses, homiletics and liturgy (the last three in both Jewish and Christian versions). All of these texts aspired to impart religious messages, not describe events, and frequently the events they do describe are incredible, though they are often repeated as fact by modern historians. Aside from the episodes discussed in the body of this chapter there are perhaps three events which have a relatively strong claim on historicity though even these are poorly attested. The Palestinian Jewish rebellion under Gallus Caesar (c. 352) has been alternately magnified and dismissed; indeed, it seems certain that some sort of uprising occurred, centred in Galilee, which may explain the destruction at Sepphoris observed by archaeologists and now conventionally attributed to the effects of the earthquake of 363. Perhaps the same event explains the apparent mid-fourth-century decline in settlement in south-eastern Galilee, as well (see below). But the complete silence about the revolt both in the Palestinian Talmud, for whose editors the reign of Gallus Caesar was probably within living memory, and in the works of Gallus’ staffer Ammianus Marcellinus, is admittedly mysterious. The best explanation may be that the rabbis opposed the uprising and so kept silent about its perpetrators, and for Ammianus it was simply not important enough to mention. The year 352 was a turbulent one and other episodes had a greater claim on his attention (Stemberger 2000: 161–84).

Introduction

The loan is among the most common types of Egyptian contracts recorded in Greek (Palme 2009: 368). It is also well represented in the Demotic legal tradition. The present chapter explores the types of loans represented in Demotic, and the variety of Greek loans from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, as well as one (5.5.3) from the Byzantine. We begin with three examples of Demotic loans of the Ptolemaic period and a text dealing with the litigation concerning a loan (5.1). These are followed by: selected Greek loans of the Ptolemaic (5.2) and Roman (5.3) periods; examples of the use of real security in the Greek papyri (5.4); and Greek loans that were components of other transactions (5.5).

In classical Athens, the credit market was populated by professional bankers and private lenders who provided large maritime loans as well as smaller amounts of credit. Recent research has pointed to the segmented image of the private credit market in Athens: the rich preferred to lend to the rich, citizens to citizens, foreigners to foreigners, whereas bank credit circulated more between social groups. In Ptolemaic Egypt, however, the credit market was dominated by private lenders, who tended to lend out to relatives, fellow villagers, or colleagues. Because of the nature of the documentation, mainly small-scale loans are attested.