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Articles by W. Graham Claytor
Pylon, 2024
A property declaration from the Princeton collection stemming from the first general survey of pr... more A property declaration from the Princeton collection stemming from the first general survey of property holdings in Egypt, which was initiated by a decree of the prefect L. Lusius Geta in 53 CE.
GRBS, 2024
Edition of a papyrus of 141/2, probably from Soknopaiou Nesos, which tracks the activities of an ... more Edition of a papyrus of 141/2, probably from Soknopaiou Nesos, which tracks the activities of an enslaved woman named Ptolema.
IWNW, 2024
Discussion of the beer industry in the Fayum village of Euhemeria with an edition of P.Fay. 215 d... more Discussion of the beer industry in the Fayum village of Euhemeria with an edition of P.Fay. 215 descr. and a correction to BGU XI 2032.
Journal of Juristic Papyrology, 2023
Edition of P.Mich. inv. 5165a, a petition from an apotactic monk, with discussion of its archaeol... more Edition of P.Mich. inv. 5165a, a petition from an apotactic monk, with discussion of its archaeological context and the evidence from Christianity at Karanis.
Slavery and Dependence in Ancient Egypt. Sources in Translation, 2024
[if not available institutionally, email me for full chapter]
Pylon, 2023
Edition of a will from the University of Michigan collection that includes a rare clause perhaps ... more Edition of a will from the University of Michigan collection that includes a rare clause perhaps influenced by Roman testamentary practice.
Pylon, 2023
Edition of two papyri from Heidelberg mentioning curatores, one a military official involved with... more Edition of two papyri from Heidelberg mentioning curatores, one a military official involved with soldiers' pay, the other likely operating in the civil realm.
![Research paper thumbnail of [Archive of] Aurelia Thermoutharion alias Herais](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/108964462/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](TM Archives, 2023
TM Arch 702: www.trismegistos.org/archive/702
![Research paper thumbnail of [Archive of] Heron son of Dioskoros](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/108964417/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](TM Archives, 2022
TM Arch 685: www.trismegistos.org/archive/685
![Research paper thumbnail of [Archive of] Hermas son of Heron](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/108964319/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](TM Archives, 2022
TM Arch 569: www.trismegistos.org/archive/569
![Research paper thumbnail of [Archive of the] Granary Directors of Karanis II](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/108964254/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](TM Archives, 2021
TM Arch 671: www.trismegistos.org/archive/671
![Research paper thumbnail of [Archive of] Longinus alias Zosimos, son of Leonides](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/108964177/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](TM Archives, 2021
TM Arch 667: www.trismegistos.org/archive/667
![Research paper thumbnail of [Archive of] Ninnaros alias Ptolemaios, son of Isidoros](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/108964054/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](TM Archives, 2021
TM Arch 666: www.trismegistos.org/archive/666
![Research paper thumbnail of [Archive of] Tapetheus daughter of Ptolemaios](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/108963932/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](TM Archives, 2021
TM Arch 664: www.trismegistos.org/archive/664
![Research paper thumbnail of [Archive of] Sabinus son of Zosimos](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/108963801/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](TM Archives, 2021
TM Arch 663: www.trismegistos.org/archive/663
Journal of Juristic Papyrology, 2022
Account belonging to the archive of Pakysis (TM Arch 165) written on the back of the Demotic temp... more Account belonging to the archive of Pakysis (TM Arch 165) written on the back of the Demotic temple inventory P 6848. Appendix discusses the acquisition history of the papyrus, which was part of a group of 13 Berlin papyri acquired by the National Museum in Warsaw in 1998.
In: Lajos Berkes – W. Graham Claytor – Maria Nowak, Papyrologische und althistorische Studien zum 65. Geburtstag von Andrea Jördens (Philippika 167), Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 307-327, 2023
New evidence on communication practices and salaried work in the administration of Roman Egypt, i... more New evidence on communication practices and salaried work in the administration of Roman Egypt, including two receipts for the salary of official letter carriers (ἐπιστολαφόροι) and one for the salary of a beneficiarius.
Chronique d'Égypte, 2022
(full article embargoed by publisher; email for offprint) Edition of P.Mich. inv. 4188 (Theadelph... more (full article embargoed by publisher; email for offprint) Edition of P.Mich. inv. 4188 (Theadelphia, 62 [?] BCE), a Greek receipt for the "didrachmia of Souchos" with a Demotic subscription. The article includes a full discussion of this 10% property transfer tax due to the temple of Sobek in Arsinoe and attested for properties located throughout the Fayum.
Pylon, 2024
A property declaration from the Princeton collection stemming from the first general survey of pr... more A property declaration from the Princeton collection stemming from the first general survey of property holdings in Egypt, which was initiated by a decree of the prefect L. Lusius Geta in 53 CE.
GRBS, 2024
Edition of a papyrus of 141/2, probably from Soknopaiou Nesos, which tracks the activities of an ... more Edition of a papyrus of 141/2, probably from Soknopaiou Nesos, which tracks the activities of an enslaved woman named Ptolema.
IWNW, 2024
Discussion of the beer industry in the Fayum village of Euhemeria with an edition of P.Fay. 215 d... more Discussion of the beer industry in the Fayum village of Euhemeria with an edition of P.Fay. 215 descr. and a correction to BGU XI 2032.
Journal of Juristic Papyrology, 2023
Edition of P.Mich. inv. 5165a, a petition from an apotactic monk, with discussion of its archaeol... more Edition of P.Mich. inv. 5165a, a petition from an apotactic monk, with discussion of its archaeological context and the evidence from Christianity at Karanis.
Slavery and Dependence in Ancient Egypt. Sources in Translation, 2024
[if not available institutionally, email me for full chapter]
Pylon, 2023
Edition of a will from the University of Michigan collection that includes a rare clause perhaps ... more Edition of a will from the University of Michigan collection that includes a rare clause perhaps influenced by Roman testamentary practice.
Pylon, 2023
Edition of two papyri from Heidelberg mentioning curatores, one a military official involved with... more Edition of two papyri from Heidelberg mentioning curatores, one a military official involved with soldiers' pay, the other likely operating in the civil realm.
TM Archives, 2023
TM Arch 702: www.trismegistos.org/archive/702
TM Archives, 2022
TM Arch 685: www.trismegistos.org/archive/685
TM Archives, 2022
TM Arch 569: www.trismegistos.org/archive/569
TM Archives, 2021
TM Arch 671: www.trismegistos.org/archive/671
TM Archives, 2021
TM Arch 667: www.trismegistos.org/archive/667
TM Archives, 2021
TM Arch 666: www.trismegistos.org/archive/666
TM Archives, 2021
TM Arch 664: www.trismegistos.org/archive/664
TM Archives, 2021
TM Arch 663: www.trismegistos.org/archive/663
Journal of Juristic Papyrology, 2022
Account belonging to the archive of Pakysis (TM Arch 165) written on the back of the Demotic temp... more Account belonging to the archive of Pakysis (TM Arch 165) written on the back of the Demotic temple inventory P 6848. Appendix discusses the acquisition history of the papyrus, which was part of a group of 13 Berlin papyri acquired by the National Museum in Warsaw in 1998.
In: Lajos Berkes – W. Graham Claytor – Maria Nowak, Papyrologische und althistorische Studien zum 65. Geburtstag von Andrea Jördens (Philippika 167), Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 307-327, 2023
New evidence on communication practices and salaried work in the administration of Roman Egypt, i... more New evidence on communication practices and salaried work in the administration of Roman Egypt, including two receipts for the salary of official letter carriers (ἐπιστολαφόροι) and one for the salary of a beneficiarius.
Chronique d'Égypte, 2022
(full article embargoed by publisher; email for offprint) Edition of P.Mich. inv. 4188 (Theadelph... more (full article embargoed by publisher; email for offprint) Edition of P.Mich. inv. 4188 (Theadelphia, 62 [?] BCE), a Greek receipt for the "didrachmia of Souchos" with a Demotic subscription. The article includes a full discussion of this 10% property transfer tax due to the temple of Sobek in Arsinoe and attested for properties located throughout the Fayum.
This paper examines the nature of religion and community in the village of Karanis in the context... more This paper examines the nature of religion and community in the village of Karanis in the context of Rome’s sweeping reorganization of Egypt. Roman reforms undermined traditional power structures through the confiscation of temple land and dilution of priestly perquisites, while many aspects of temple administration now came under the supervision of the state. At the same time, Rome encouraged the development of an imperial cult as part of a project to urbanize the nomes and foster a loyal Hellenic elite to run them. The traditional view of these developments emphasizes the decline of native temples and their priesthoods, which were once the social, economic, and spiritual core of Egyptian communities, and a corollary rise of decentered and domesticized forms of native religion, expressed most conspicuously through domestic cult and private magical rites. Recent challenges to this picture point to the continued influence of local temples well into the Roman period, while also exposing the methodological shortcomings of positing a strict dichotomy between communal religious experience and domestic cult.
The village of Karanis in the Fayum is one of the best-documented rural communities from antiquity and is thus an ideal setting to test competing views of religious change in the Roman period. While the rich assortment of evidence for domestic cult has received some attention, Karanis’ two main temples and their priests have been comparatively neglected, to the point that some scholars have even dismissed their significance in the local community. In the first part of this paper, I bring together the disparate evidence concerning Karanis’ priesthood in order to correct this picture and underline their continued vitality well into the second century. Yet I also argue that, unlike their counterparts in Tebtunis, Karanis priests did not play an important role in local land tenure arrangements, which goes back to a decision forced upon all Egyptian temples at the onset of Roman rule. This contrast underscores the diversity of collective responses among the priests of Egypt to the new demands of empire and warns against creating too monolithic a picture of temple communities in the Roman period.
In the second part of the paper, I put these developments into an imperial context. I argue that Roman reforms and the introduction of the imperial cult, while weakening the temples and promoting new competitors for local prestige, did not destroy the traditional, temple-based community, but rather inserted this community into a new cosmology of power. This new sacred landscape is brought to life by the forthcoming Karanis Prayer Papyrus, which honors the imperial house, the Greek gods of Alexandria, and finally the local crocodile gods of Karanis, before concluding with a prayer on behalf of the “Tyche of Karanis,” the guardian spirit or good fortune of the village community.
The archive of Harthotes, priest and public farmer of Theadelphia, is a rather enigmatic group of... more The archive of Harthotes, priest and public farmer of Theadelphia, is a rather enigmatic group of texts. Early interpretations focused on the family’s chronic debt as evidence of a threadbare existence (Casanova, 130), but more recent commentators have pointed out that the family was able to repay all of their loans, while leasing fairly substantial tracts of land and engaging in a variety of economic ventures (Rowlandson, 189). Perhaps because of these conflicting views, historians have not given the archive the attention that it deserves. The recent discovery of twelve more papyri belonging to the archive, including contracts, petitions, and another census declaration, therefore offers a welcome opportunity to reassess this important family archive from the early days of Roman rule.
In the first part of the paper, we draw on these unpublished texts to provide a fresh overview of the archive, including its acquisition history, types of documents, and earlier interpretations. We are inclined towards a relatively favorable view of the family’s economic position and point to a new work contract in which Harthotes appears as a foreman for 12 harvest workers (P.Mich. inv. 4436g+4344, 12/11 BCE). Then, we focus on a group of unpublished contracts that shed light on a previously unknown aspect of the family’s activities. They are paramone (service) contracts in which young members of the family are indentured in exchange for advance payments or interest-free loans. By locating these contracts within the archive and drawing on recent work on the family in Roman Egypt (Huebner, Pudsey), we argue that these are not acts of desperation, but rather part of a strategy for dealing with persistent cash flow problems. The family’s repeated recourse to mortgaging their children’s labor fits with their advance crop sales and loans in a web of financial obligations that implicated the whole family.
The longest and most complete example is P.Mich. inv. 931 + P.Col. inv. 7 (9 CE). In this contract, Harthotes arranges for his young daughter Taphaunes to work at an oil press on the estate of Livia and Germanicus for two and a half years, a renewal of a similar arrangement from two years earlier (P.Mich. inv. 4346+4446f, 7 CE). The return on his daughter’s labor is an advance payment of 80 drachmas, but since the employer was obliged to feed and clothe her, the family also benefitted from hidden savings on her maintenance, perhaps amounting to some 100 drachmas per year. Much earlier, Harthotes (acting with his mother Esersythis) had sent off his younger brother to work in another household in the village for four years (P.Mich. inv. 4299, 20/19 BCE), in this case for an interest-free loan, and a later contract suggests such practice continued in later generations (P.Mil. I2 7, 38 CE).
These contracts and the other unpublished documents promise to open up a new chapter in the study of the Harthotes archive and to provide valuable evidence for the financial and social strategies available to village families of Greco-Roman Egypt.
"The image of worm-eaten rolls lying within a wooden threshold has often been reproduced, and has... more "The image of worm-eaten rolls lying within a wooden threshold has often been reproduced, and has become somewhat of a symbol for the prospect of integrating papyrological and archaeological evidence. The contents of this “threshold archive” from Karanis, however, have never been clearly identified and only two texts have been published to date. This paper establishes the contents of the archive and argues that it belonged to the manager of Karanis’ grapheion in the early second-century CE.
With one exception, everything found in the threshold contains columns of an anagraphe, a day-by-day register of contracts drawn up in Karanis’ grapheion. This anagraphe records the grammatikon (writing fee) paid for drawing up each document, which means it was a private financial document belonging to the manager of the grapheion. This type of document is best paralleled by P.Mich. II 123 recto, covering receipts of grammatikon in Tebtunis’ grapheion in 45/6 CE, with accounts of expenditures on the other side. The Karanis text, however, incorporates expenditures into the structure of the anagraphe and diligently balances these expenditures against the receipts of grammatikon on a daily and periodic basis. It can thus be seen as a hybrid and streamlined version of the Tebtunis roll.
The one outlier in this archive is a magical or astronomical text that appears to have little to do with the grapheion. One side, however, has been washed clean and I argue that it was introduced into the archive for eventual re-use. In fact, the two published texts from the threshold, P.Mich. VII 430 (Latin sayings) and P.Congr. XV 15 (episkepsis) were pasted together to form a long roll bearing columns of the anagraphe on the other side. Far from a multifunctional archive, therefore, the threshold texts were assembled by a frugal grapheion manager for a single purpose.
"
P.Fordham inv. 5 is a second century BCE petition to the archidikastes. This text is important be... more P.Fordham inv. 5 is a second century BCE petition to the archidikastes. This text is important because of the new light it sheds on the role of the ill-attested chief judicial official of the Ptolemaic empire, on interactions between the chora and Alexandria, and on the relationship between ethnicity and law in the later Ptolemaic period.
An Egyptian woman, Senyris of Oxyrhynchos, petitions the archidikastes Demophon about her mistreatment at the hands of NN son of Pankrates, the father of her two children, who is not providing her with food or clothing (as per a contract of maintenance). She charges him with throwing her out of the house, having relations with another woman and, before the papyrus breaks off, refers to a complaint in connection with the laokritai.
We have very few references to Ptolemaic archidikastai: two others are known by name among only a handful of attestations of the office. Comparison with earlier 2nd-century papyri suggest that the office merged with that of the πρὸς τῆι ἐμιμελείαι τῶν χρηματιστῶν sometime in the middle of the 2nd century, in any case, before the present document. The interpretation that he was in charge of the entire Ptolemaic judicial system receives support from the present document, but the fullest expression of the office's powers might date only from this suspected bureaucratic merger.
This text will help us better understand both this important office and legal relations between the chora and Alexandria during this dynamic period of Ptolemaic history.
Philippika - Altertumswissenschaftliche Abhandlungen / Contributions to the Study of Ancient World Cultures, 2023
Dieses Buch ist der Heidelberger Papyrologin und Althistorikerin Andrea Jördens zu ihrem 65. Gebu... more Dieses Buch ist der Heidelberger Papyrologin und Althistorikerin Andrea Jördens zu ihrem 65. Geburtstag gewidmet und enthält 15 Studien und 47 Editionen papyrologischer Texte und Inschriften. Eingeleitet wird der Band mit einer Vorstellung und Würdigung der wissenschaftlichen Laufbahn der honoranda. Der darauffolgende erste Teil des Buches enthält Essays, deren Themen die breit aufgestellten Interessen von Andrea Jördens in diversen Bereichen der antiken Welt widerspiegeln, sich jedoch überwiegend auf ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte konzentrieren: Papyrologie, antikes Buchwesen, römische Rechts-, Verwaltungs-, Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Weitere Beiträge beschäftigen sich mit der Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Papyrologie in Deutschland, antiker Magie und Tintenrezepten der koptisch-arabischen Welt. Der zweite Teil des Bandes schließlich enthält die Editionen dreier (semi)literarischer und 41 dokumentarischer Texte, einer griechischen Inschrift und zweier Graffiti. Die (semi)literarischen Texte stammen zum einen von Homer und sind zum anderen ein Psalmamulett sowie eine unbekannte spätantike Homilie. Die dokumentarischen Texte umfassen private und Verwaltungsdokumente von der ptolemäischen bis zur früharabischen Zeit (3. Jh. v. Chr. bis 8. Jh. n. Chr.), geschrieben auf Papyri, Ostraka und Holztafeln. Die Inschrift beleuchtet die Geschichte eines gymnasions in Ägypten, und die beiden Graffiti geben über einen hohen Beamten des 4. Jh. n. Chr. Auskunft.
Archiv für Papyrusforschung und verwandte Gebiete – Beihefte, 41, 2020
Papyri from Karanis: The Granary C123 is the twenty- first volume of University of Michigan papyr... more Papyri from Karanis: The Granary C123 is the twenty- first volume of University of Michigan papyri and the fourth devoted to texts from the University’s excavations at Karanis. The volume offers a contextualized edition of thirty-seven documents found in a single structure, a large granary (C123) originally built in the first century CE, in addition to an analysis of the archaeology and history of the structure.