Books in the Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents series

Through the analysis of legal documents surviving on papyrus, such as petitions, reports of court proceedings, and letters, this book examines the contribution that petitioning and litigation made to the maintenance of the social order in Roman Egypt between 30 BC and AD 284, and focuses on how the legal system achieved its formal goals.

These volumes offer a detailed presentation of a set of letters associated with Arsama, satrap in Egypt in the later fifth century and the bullae that sealed them. The letters are translated and provided with line-by-line commentary, alongside thematic essays.

The first of three volumes offering a detailed presentation of a set of letters associated with Arsama, satrap in Egypt in the later fifth century BC and the bullae that sealed them. This volume provides text and translation of the letters, along with appendices detailing Egyptiak and Akkadian documents that refer to Arsama.

The third of three volumes offering a detailed presentation of a set of letters associated with Arsama, satrap in Egypt in the later fifth century BC and the bullae that sealed them. This volume explores the administrative, economic, military, ideological, religious, and artistic context of the letters.

This is the first of three volumes of a Corpus of Ptolemaic Inscriptions from Egypt.

This volume reconceptualizes scribal variation in pre-modern Egypt from the perspective of contemporary historical sociolinguistics, as a rich source for understanding the scribes' complex socio-cultural environments. A series of case studies applies this framework to scribal variation spanning thousands of years, from Pharaonic to Islamic Egypt.

This volume is a study of the role which institutions played in the interstate system of the ancient Greek world (the most complex in recorded history), exploring how and why the thousand or more Greek city-states used interstate institutions to network with each other over a period of five hundred years and why this changed under the Roman Empire.

This volume reconstructs the history of documentary practice in pharaonic Egypt from the early Old Kingdom to the administrative changes imposed by the Graeco-Roman period. It explores how the writing of documents was embedded in the interactions between customary social practices and the penetration of outside hierarchies into local government.

A new edition, with translation, introduction, commentary, and interpretative essays, of the Lex Portorii Asiae - the regulations drawn up over nearly two centuries for the customs dues of the rich province of Asia (western Turkey).

The ink and stylus tablets discovered at the Roman fort of Vindolanda are a unique historical resource but are extremely difficult to read. This book details the development of what appears to be the first system constructed to aid experts in the process of reading an ancient document, exploring the use of techniques from Artificial Intelligence.

An examination of the importance attached to preserving the memory of the dead in the Roman world, and an exploration of the ways in which funerary inscriptions can be used to reconstruct Roman lives. The valuable source material is extensively reproduced, and the discussion is accessible to non-specialists.

An interdisciplinary study that offers a systematic approach to ancient archival documents from the Near East, the Mycenean world, and classical Greece. This book addresses questions of formal aspects of creating, writing, and storing ancient documents, and how concepts of record-keeping were adapted by different societies in the ancient world.

This collection of detailed studies of the epigraphical landscape of Ptolemaic Egypt explores the historical and cultural contexts of the surviving Greek and Greek/Egyptian bilingual and trilingual inscriptions as a complement to the Corpus of Ptolemaic Inscriptions edition, in which the texts will be presented together for the first time.

This volume illustrates the multiple ways in which epigraphy enables historical analysis of the postclassical polis across a world of geographically dispersed poleis. The collection of 16 papers looks at a variety of themes and aims to identify the postclassical polis both as a reality and as a constructed concept.

From the archaic period onwards, ancient literary authors working within a range of genres discussed and quoted a variety of inscriptions. This volume offers a wide-ranging set of perspectives on the diversity of epigraphic material present in ancient literary texts, and the variety of responses, both ancient and modern, which they can provoke.

A collection of essays, by leading international scholars, on the history of the Greek theatre, and on the wider context of festival culture in which theatrical activity took place in the Greek world. The emphasis is on a fresh interpretation of the documentary material - inscriptions, archaeological remains, and monuments.