Documentary Snapshots from Seventh-Century Egypt: Local Responses to Regime Transitions

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The seventh century of our era witnessed dramatic events and transformations in the political, religious, and cultural landscape of the Near East and North Africa. Egypt did not escape the turmoil and subsequent changes. It had been relatively tranquil since its annexation to Rome in 30 BCE, but the seventh century brought a series of shocks. The country was invaded and conquered twice, first by the Sasanian Persians and then by the Arabs, who brought an end to the previous regime. Narrative sources in various languages convey a fairly detailed picture of political developments, but tell us little about how the high drama and changes affected the lives of local people and how they responded. For insight into these questions, we depend on the writing materials preserved in the sands of Egypt, papyri and ostraca. Letters and contracts, lists and accounts, receipts and chits offer unique glimpses of everyday life in the ancient world. They constitute primary evidence for administrative, social, and economic history of a kind that is hard to obtain from any other part of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Papyrologists have been deciphering, translating, and interpreting these texts for the benefit of the wider scholarly community for over a century, but large numbers of important texts await further study and publication. The work is necessarily slow and meticulous given the formidable technical challenges involved; we publish new texts, but also review those published previously, with the help of our ever-growing experience and technological advances. The goal of the project is to make a large amount of completely new or understudied evidence available to scholars in various disciplines. The material in question falls into three clusters, each of which offers a different snapshot of the Egyptian hinterland in the seventh century: 1. The archive of Theopemptos and Zacharias, consisting of some 60 ostraca from the city of Hermonthis in southern Egypt, the largest body of documentary texts from the time of the Persian occupation. Most of these have been published in some form, but presented in such a way that only specialists have been able to use them effectively; as a result, they have attracted little attention.2. A tax account book from a village in the area of Hermopolis in middle Egypt. It is the earliest of its kind, dating from very soon after the Arab conquest; it records both Byzantine taxes and the poll-tax introduced by the Arabs. All but one of the extant leaves of the codex have been published, but in the absence of an accessible, comprehensive, up-to-date edition, this resource has been used much less than it merits.3. The archive of Iordanes, the chief administrator of Hermonthis at the end of the seventh century. Some 50 papyri in Coptic and Greek, all unpublished, make up the largest documentary assemblage from the 680s-690s, and illustrate the beginnings of major reforms in the Caliphate and their effect at local level.