Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Original Sources of Chapters
- List of illustrations
- Glossary
- Maps
- Foreword
- Introduction: Jean Bingen and the currents of Ptolemaic history
- Part I The Monarchy
- Part II The Greeks
- Part III The Royal Economy
- 13 The Revenue Laws Papyrus: Greek tradition and Hellenistic adaptation
- 14 The structural tensions of Ptolemaic society
- 15 The third-century land-leases from Tholthis
- Part IV Greeks and Egyptians
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- General index
- Index of passages discussed
- HELLENISTIC CULTURE AND SOCIETY
15 - The third-century land-leases from Tholthis
from Part III - The Royal Economy
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Original Sources of Chapters
- List of illustrations
- Glossary
- Maps
- Foreword
- Introduction: Jean Bingen and the currents of Ptolemaic history
- Part I The Monarchy
- Part II The Greeks
- Part III The Royal Economy
- 13 The Revenue Laws Papyrus: Greek tradition and Hellenistic adaptation
- 14 The structural tensions of Ptolemaic society
- 15 The third-century land-leases from Tholthis
- Part IV Greeks and Egyptians
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- General index
- Index of passages discussed
- HELLENISTIC CULTURE AND SOCIETY
Summary
The publication by Wolfgang Müller of BGU X drew my attention to a set of Ptolemaic documents that fitted into the general framework of studies I was carrying out on the social components of the population of Hellenistic Egypt. In this chapter I deal with a small group of texts limited in time, restricted to a single village and confined to one type of juridical transaction, the leasing and subletting of cleruchic holdings.
In fact, the nucleus of the texts we will be considering consists of a series of land-leases and receipts for rents drawn up at Tholthis in the Oxyrhynchite nome during the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth years of Ptolemy IV Philopator. These documents come from mummy cartonnage, the yield of which is scattered over several collections, especially those of Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt.
From the methodological point of view, it is both interesting and dangerous to centre our attention on such a small and uniform group of texts. It is interesting to study it separately mainly because I feel that as far as the third century bc is concerned, we tend to consider the documentation for that period as a whole, whereas in fact it covers a century of deep change in the way the Greeks behaved in the Nile valley, from the first military occupation to the progressive development of a Greek urban bourgeoisie.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Hellenistic EgyptMonarchy, Society, Economy, Culture, pp. 206 - 212Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007