The Petra Papyri III (review)

Outside Egypt, the Roman Near East has yielded an astonishingly rich crop of papyri (H.M. Cotton, W.E.H. Cockle, R. Millar, “The Papyrology of the Roman Near East: A Survey,” JRS 85 [1995], 214–35). Two corpora, in particular, are of immense interest to scholars of Late Antiquity, the papyri discovered in Nessana (the Negev, Israel) in the 1930s (L. Casson, E.L. Hettich, Excavations at Nessana II. The Literary Papyri [Princeton 1950]; C.J. Kraemer, Excavations at Nessana III. The Non-Literary Papyri [Princeton 1958]), and those discovered at Petra (Jordan) in 1993. In both cases, the papyri provide information that neither archaeology nor other literary sources have yielded.

The Petra papyri offer insights into economic transactions in sixth-century Petra, a town that served as the capital of the province of Palaestina Tertia (Salutaris) from about 400 CE to the Muslim conquest in the early seventh century and was considered all but dead after a shattering earthquake in 363. So meager is the information about the city in Late Antiquity that for all intents and purpose Petra had dropped out of view. Recent excavations have yielded a new image of Petra in Late Antiquity. The town boasted at least three churches and archives that preserved the business dealings of a local clan.

The Petra papyri, all written in Greek, were found in a room adjacent to the so-called Petra church dedicated to Mary (Z.T. Fiema, et al., The Petra Church [Amman 2001]). Publication has been projected in several volumes of which the one under review, although numbered third, is the second to be published. The first volume (PP I) included 16 papyri (nos 1–16); the third (PP III) includes 19 additional papyri (nos. 18–36). The second, when published, will include one papyrus, no. 17, the longest of all the papyri. PP III is preceded by two bibliographies, corrigenda, and an addendum to the first volume. Its eleven indexes cover both the first and the third volumes.

The introduction to PP III discusses the physical format and notarial conventions in the papyri, and the calendars used (with two charts, one showing the dates according to the Macedonian and Julian calendars; the other a synoptic chronological table). The editors also provide a family tree for Theodoros, the most frequently attested person in the papyri. Each of the papyri is preceded by an individual introduction followed by the text, translation, and commentary. Like the first volume, PP III is a model of erudition and caution. The fragmentary state of many of the papyri has not rendered the task of the editors easy.

One merit of the Petra papyri is their narrow chronological range—all belong to the sixth century, an era of apparent decline at which the papyri do not hint. The papyri also indicate how local denizens kept pace with time. Several chronological systems were in use, including the imperial regnal year, consular years, indictions, and provincial eras (of Arabia and of Gaza). The calendars in use were the Macedonian and the Julian.

The papyri reflect a normalcy that suggests a tenor of life that hardly differed from the dynamics known elsewhere in townlets throughout the Near East. Inheritance and tax matters reign supreme. Who was entitled to what, and who already had paid whatever should have been paid were the kind of transactions that required careful recording. The single papyrus that has remained intact lists items suspected of being stolen by a tenant, as though to remind posterity just what had been lawfully acquired by one man and unlawfully obtained by another.

Historians of the Roman and Byzantine Near East may want to ask whether these documents lend themselves to a narrative of the kind that John Matthews constructed from another, smaller group of papyri organized around Theophanes and his travels in the early fourth century (The Journey of Theophanes. Travel, Business, and Daily Life in the Roman East [New Haven...