Introduction

The fact that papyrus documents are often associated with family archives shows us that the family was an important factor behind the production of private contracts. That is immediately clear in marriage contracts (4.1), for example, and in disputes over inherited property, as well as conflicts over broken marriage promises and outright resistance to an arranged marriage (10.5.4). Underlying the conveyance of property, wills, and often sales of property lay family relationships and their expectations. Among the strongest of these was the expectation that children would inherit the property of their parents.

In the previous chapter we have seen the extent to which the language of law was bound up with the various and diverse ethnic groups living in Egypt. One of the key issues in studying the papyri is the presence of Roman law found in the Egyptian documentation (3.3). Indeed Roman law had an important impact on family life, not only in the structure of particular texts such as wills but also in the realm of behavior. The reader may wish to start with 4.3 to gain a sense of the impact of Roman law on the family as it is reflected in the papyri.

Introduction

Anyone who has seen a spectacular movie set in Egypt, say, for example, The Ten Commandments starring Charlton Heston, will be forgiven for coming away with the impression that the land was full of slaves who spent all their time suffering while building pyramids and other massive structures. Herodotus (2.124), of course, reports a similar image of slave labor and pyramid building. So it is perhaps surprising to see in the preceding chapter (8.1 introduction) that slavery in Ptolemaic Egypt was a negligible phenomenon and that such slaves as there were were mostly engaged in domestic service in Greek and hellenized Egyptian households. That would conform to what we know about pre-Ptolemaic practice, according to which slaves are found performing work in the non-agricultural sector, in households (see also of course Joseph’s service to Potiphar in Genesis), in quarries, and in royal building projects. In agriculture, before the Ptolemies, many persons were bound to specific estates – to temple estates, or to the large estates of state officials – as “serfs” (Lloyd 1983: 315). Often the Egyptian terminology does not help us define exactly what the status of these workers was, but we may be safe in assuming that their status, like that of many workers in antiquity, was somewhere between fully free and fully enslaved. It was in the first millennium bc that the state began to recognize a particular institution that we may call slavery. It is documented in contracts of sale (Donker van Heel 1995: 177–82). The so-called self-sale to satisfy a debt (P.Ryl. 5 [569 bc]; see 5.1 above) and the seizure of debtors and/or their children continued to occur in the Ptolemaic period and beyond, not without attempts at regulation (e.g., 9.1.2, 10.1.2; cf. 5.5.3, 9.3.1).

But there was no need for large-scale agricultural slavery in a land full of laborers, some of whom brought their own specialized skills to bear on the agrarian economy (Chapter 8, passim). Under such circumstances the scholarly interest in slavery as an object of historiographical investigation and as a social and legal phenomenon in Egypt is probably out of proportion to its importance as a demographic and economic phenomenon.

Introduction

In the Egyptian legal tradition the private conveyance by sale was conceived of as an oral agreement between two parties, or two groups of parties, in the presence of witnesses. Property rights were well developed in ancient Egypt before the Ptolemaic period. In order for a person to convey title to a piece of property, an equivalent value had to be exchanged. Thus the Demotic “sale contract” was termed a “document in exchange for silver” (above, 2.2). This basic idea was valid for other types of conveyances, and was at times merely fictional, i.e., an actual exchange of property for an equivalent value did not always occur.

This basic principle of Egyptian law, “notwendige Entgeltlichkeit” (“necessary remuneration”), is paralleled in other ancient Near Eastern traditions. If the surviving record is any guide, there was considerable evolution in the formalities of the written sale in ancient Egypt and, over time, an increase in the use of written instruments of sale. Most conveyances were probably accomplished orally and therefore without need of a document. Before the first millennium bc, most sales recorded in writing simple memorialized oral agreements and were rudimentary.

Introduction

In the Egyptian millennium covered by this volume two major languages were spoken and written. Egyptian was the larger in terms of number of speakers, while Greek, certainly spoken in Egypt during much of the first millennium bc, became in the Ptolemaic period the dominant language of administration and the language of law. The Egyptian language is represented in its two last phases by two different scripts. The first, which developed in the Delta during the seventh century bc and spread through Egypt by the fifth century bc, is known as Demotic, characterized by a highly cursive script that developed out of the cursive Hieroglyphic writing known as Hieratic. The second phase, Coptic, began to be written around ad 300 and came to be used in legal documents by the sixth century ad, though it did not become a dominant contractual language until after the Arab conquest (3.4). This last stage of the Egyptian language deployed a Greek alphabet to which were added several signs left over from Demotic that preserved phonemes in Egyptian not found in Greek.

Thus during the three traditional phases of Egyptian political history documented in this volume (Ptolemaic, Roman, Byzantine) Egypt was a serially bilingual society. Of course, the Romans through their conquest introduced Latin as a language prominent in certain military and legal contexts (3.3, 4.3). This notwithstanding, Greek remained for Egypt, whether ruled from Rome or Constantinople, the chief administrative and legal language. It continued as such past the Arab conquest into the early eighth century ad (3.4).

Introduction

This chapter is concerned with the contractual relationship between laborers and employers. As it was elsewhere in the ancient world, the economic form that labor took ranged from fully free labor in the household, to paid wage labor, to slavery (Chapter 9). As such, the texts that are presented here are generally concerned with free labor subject to certain contractual restrictions. Those restrictions, documented for example in the paramonê contracts (for which see also 5.5.2–3), included the stipulation to remain in a particular place to work during the length of the contract. The use of contracts to hire labor has an earlier history in the Ancient Near East. There was of course dependent labor particularly in agricultural work and domestic service (Chapter 9). In the periods covered by this volume, most labor arrangements were oral and therefore escape us entirely.

The preserved Ptolemaic contracts – only a few survive – are concerned generally with agriculture and related work, including the clearing of brushwood (8.1.1) and canal maintenance (8.1.3), or specifically with work in a so-called monopoly industry such as beer-making (not represented below). 8.1.2, however, is a private agreement between two parties for the manufacture of a yoke and basket.