Vleeming – författare

A large majority of the 65 ostraka published in this volume come from Egypt in the Third Century B.C. Some thirty are from Elephantine; these comprise a number of Greek and Greek-demotic receipts. Not unimportant new texts from Hermonthis and Thebes (among others, a fine example of a temple oath) add notably to the diversity of the volume. Although of course tax receipts predominate, these are present in a rich variety, and their commentaries add much to our knowledge of fiscal matters in this period.As a nouveaute the Greek and demotic texts are published on exactly the same footing, and a constant effort is made to merge the separate worlds of Greek and demotic papyrology.Hand-facsimiles facilitate the consultation of the individual texts; the whole is rounded off by photographic plates showing all texts in full.

The choachytes (or morticians) of the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes provided a rich documentation linking the city of the living on one side of the Nile with the city of the dead on the other. The family archives of these choachytes deal to a large part with their professional role in serving the dead entrusted to their care, but they are also virtually our only source of information about the city of Thebes, whose physical remains were ruthlessly obliterated in the nineteenth century. This material constitute one end of a chain which links the temple statues of Amun's servants and descriptions of their houses on the one hand with their tombs and their tomb inventories on the other, allowing us to identify individual choachytes from their papers. The papyrological finds can thus provide an exact dating for objects that might otherwise be only dated to within several centuries, while the objects themselves and the tomb architecture provide a factual dimension to historical and legal documents which might otherwise remain flat and arid.It was in order to draw attention to the richness of all the constituent parts of this documentation that a number of scholars were invited to present their views on Graeco-Roman Thebes at a colloqium held from 9 to 11 September 1992 in Leiden, the Netherlands. The survey papers and communications presented at this colloqium are published here.

On May 1st, 1998 Professor P.W.Pestman retired from academic teaching. His contributions to the field of papyrology are well known: he has continually stressed the importance of Egyptian sources for the study of Greek and Roman Egypt, and the importance of studying the Greek and Egyptian documentation together, in context. Indeed, he has been among the first to link the formerly separate Greek and Egyptian documentation, establishing modern papyrological practice. He has thus given an Egyptian face to Graeco-Roman society, to complement the Greek face that had previously dominated papyrology. The present volume contains twelve contributions by members and alumni of the Papyrologisch Instituut that illustrate the two faces of Graeco-Roman Egypt and show how they may be tied together.