Nature of the Documentation

The documentary papyri from Greco-Roman and late antique Egypt form a rich repository of topographical information, revealing the sorts of personal landmarks that individuals used in their daily navigation of local landscapes and providing us with a basis from which we can begin to assess the physical and symbolic presence the ancient monuments may have had in those landscapes.⁹ Toponyms occur in the papyri in a wide range of contexts, from the dockets of personal letters to the records of municipal council meetings.

Excellent early examples of this usage, in both Demotic and Greek, are to be found among the texts discussed by P. W. Pestman in his analysis of the second-century bc archive of a group of Theban choachytes, or mortuary priests. Several of these documents pertain to a house in the city that was jointly owned by the choachytes, and the location of the building is described in some detail in 16 of the texts.¹³ The position of the house in the southern quarter of Thebes is typically noted first, followed by a more precise localization made by reference to the major streets in the area, including the dromoi, or proces­sional ways, of the temples of Khons-Herakles, Mut-Hera and Opet-Demeter.

as ‘the street of pharaoh, l.p.h.’ ‘p5 hjr n Pr-T and in Greek as the ‘royal

street’ (‘ρύμη βασιλική’).¹⁴

The continuity of this usage in Greek legal texts from the Roman period is attested in numerous documents from cities such as Oxyrhynchus and Hermopolis, which follow the practice of locating property by reference to the dromoi of major temples, to the temple precincts themselves, and to other important local monuments. For example, the house that is the object of the inheritance settlement addressed in SB VIII 9824.5 (ad 31) is described as ‘near the Serapeum in the same city [of Oxyrhynchus] in the Quarter of the Hermaion’ (‘έπι του [π]ρος τή αύτή πόλει Σαραπιήου έν λαύρια Ερμαίου’), and numerous Oxyrhynchite texts from the first four centuries ad bear witness to, inter alia, the Quarter of the Dromos of Serapis (e.g.

In the late antique documents that are the main concern of the present discussion, we see a clear continuation of earlier formulaic legal usage, if not necessarily of the specific topographical reference points named in the earlier texts. Thus, for example, in P.Lond. V 1733, a deed of sale from Syene dating to ad 594, Aurelia Tapia sells two shares of a house described (lines 24-5) as being situated ‘in the same Syene in the southern part of the fortress and in the Quarter of Saint Apa Victor, the triumphant martyr’ (‘έπι της αύτής Συήνης περι το νότινον μέρος του φρουρίου και περι λαύραν του αγίου άθλόφορου Απα Βίκτορος μάρτυρος’). Later in the document, after the seller’s legal ownership of the house shares has been established, the location of the house is further specified by reference to its physical boundaries (lines 35-40).

As mentioned above, the Coptic leases and deeds of sale from late antiquity typically bear a close formal relationship to their Greek counterparts, and this

similarity extends to the description of property in the documents. P.KRU 10, a Theban document from ad 722 recording the sale of a plot of land in the village of Jeme, clearly exemplifies this relationship.¹⁶ In the text, the property being sold is initially described (lines 12-13) as ‘this one which is to the East of the topos of Saint Apa Patermoute in Kastron Jeme' (‘n\l ©TMn©l©BT MnTOn[OC ©TO]YWB MnpThlOC n\T©pM©YT© Mn©K\CTpON

NXHM©’). A fuller description, including a more precise description of the property’s boundaries, is then provided in lines 33-9. The long-term conti­nuity of this sort of legal description clause, which, as demonstrated by the examples cited above, extended from the Demotic contracts of the Ptolemaic period through to the latest of the Coptic legal documents, makes these texts a particularly valuable resource for tracking diachronic changes in local toponymy.