This chapter brings together Greek documentary papyri from family archives in and around the town of Tebtynis in the Fayyum, with the archaeological record for housing across the region. In so doing, it presents a case for understanding the ownership, transactions and leasing of houses, or parts of houses, as a means to develop or preserve social status and standing in these towns and villages. The chapter explores transactions in the papyri between known individuals, against the context of the observed physical life cycle of houses and their associated outside space. It concludes that, for those individuals of specific social status (primarily gymnasial), both close and extended kinship ties were an important part of the considerations when financial transactions took place involving housing. Such activities were crucial to the operation of social positioning within the middle and upper echelons of these relatively small communities in the Fayyum. The extent to which these patterns may be said to be typical of similar elements of kinship and social structures across Roman Egypt is debatable, but the approach taken by this chapter provides a means of exploring these relationships further.

This introduction probes the relationship between textual and material approaches to houses of the ancient Mediterranean. Drawing on the contributions to the volume, it traces some of the ways in which documentary and archaeological sources, and the relationships between these, have shaped our knowledge of the housing and households of the Graeco-Roman world.

The ancient Mediterranean was home to a youthful population. Demographic dynamics favoured a relatively high proportion of children and adolescents who were visibly present in their multitudes in the cities, towns, and villages; a significant proportion of these young people were of slave status, some having been enslaved or, as is more likely, born into slavery. The presence and lives of enslaved persons are documented plentifully in textual, material, and literary evidence from across the Greco-Roman world, though almost all of this material reflects the concerns and attitudes of the slave-owning echelons of society, and we have no extant narrative testimony from any enslaved person from Roman Antiquity. Further, though the existence of children and young people is mentioned in key sources on, and studies of, Roman slavery, a specifically youth-focused perspective is meagre.

Populations in the past behaved in diverse ways in terms of fertility, mortality and migration – the key elements of demographic dynamics. There are many variables which influence these dynamics, including environment and epidemiology, economic activity, urbanisation, reproductive decision making and war. These variables are socio-economically and culturally specific, and are therefore likely to impact differently on populations across time and place. Population historians of most periods in European history have long acknowledged such specificity and diversity in population dynamics and behaviour; in fact, established models that suggest ‘regional’ patterns of demographic behaviour and fail to take diversity into account have recently been challenged with data from a range of populations. Similarly, the notion that all pre-modern populations can be grouped together and be seen to behave in the same way as one another is no longer tenable. Accordingly, ancient historians must view the populations of the Graeco-Roman world against the backdrop of their environmental, socio-economic and cultural diversity. The populations of the areas discussed in this volume – Athens, Rome, the metropolises and villages of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, and the rural and coastal demes in Attica – all existed within specific contexts determining, at least in part, the variables shaping their population dynamics. For this reason we cannot categorise the range of populations of the Graeco-Roman world along with all pre-modern European populations, nor can we see them as making up one distinct and homogeneous category of their own. On the other hand, there are lots of commonalities between the populations of the ancient, pre-modern and more recent past. The value of comparative research on population lies in establishing what these common relationships are, and the ways in which an understanding of one population in its particular context can help to develop a fuller picture of another. For the ancient historian, for instance, a study on population in early modern England can suggest not only the differences but also the similarities in the ways in which individuals, families and populations influence and respond to social and economic change.