This book has its origins in a time and place far from where I am now sitting. Yet despite those distances, these origins seem very close in my memory. My interest in demotic papyri was fired when, as a young high school student, I visited the office of Professor George Hughes at the Oriental Institute in Chicago. It was a “Members' Day,” a time when faculty opened their offices to the public. I entered the interesting-looking office of Professor Hughes, a warm and kind man as I quickly discovered, who showed such exuberance for his work. He took me over to a table where a demotic papyrus was laid out, and he explained that it was a house sale contract dating from the Ptolemaic period from a place called Hawara, and he began to translate the document. I was hooked for life on demotic legal papyri.

It has often been a criticism of the documentary papyri that the texts proffer only local or, more biting, merely parochial evidence. Perhaps true. But history is a composite of local histories, and in the new regime of the Ptolemies, local village-based social networks continued to be a factor in, and at times a focus of resistance against, the new economic realities of the Hellenistic world. For Greek-based Classical historians, the history of the Hellenistic world has been the study of the triumph of Greeks and Greek culture in the “East.”