Mechanics of Empire: the Karanis Register and the Writing Offices of Roman Egypt.

Abstract

This dissertation uses the public writing offices (grapheia) of Roman Egypt and the larger notarial system to explore the interplay between state and society in the Roman Empire. The starting point is a series of papyrus rolls from the village of Karanis in Egypt’s Fayum region, the so-called “threshold papyri,” which are reconstructed, edited, and analyzed here for the first time. Their importance lies in the fact that they contain lengthy portions of an account in Greek that documents four months of activity in the grapheion of Karanis during the early second century CE. The Karanis Register, as it is termed, takes on a deeper historical importance when read in light of the larger notarial system of Egypt, originally established under Ptolemaic rule. The Ptolemies successfully “reoriented” private transactions towards the state by incorporating the native Egyptian scribal class into new institutions that monitored and eventually produced private contracts. The Romans chose not only to perpetuate the Ptolemaic notarial system, but to improve it by expanding its archival functions. This innovation can be explained by the fact that the system was beneficial to both the Roman state and the provincial populace: it gave the Romans unprecedented access to information about its subjects, allowing efficient collection of taxes and assignment of compulsory duties, while providing provincials with unprecedented security for their private transactions. Yet this dissertation also gives credence to Rome’s commitment to enforcing the rule of law in the provinces as part of the imperial ideology of consensus, a shared conception of the proper relationship between the Roman state and the provincial population. The local writing offices and the larger notarial system in fact helped define this relationship: the routine act of having a contract registered in the writing office reinforced the validity of Roman hegemonic claims, but also shaped the nature of this hegemony by raising the expectation that Rome would enforce contracts. Viewed in this way, the Karanis Register is best understood as part of a Roman repurposing of the notarial system within a new ideology of empire, which imagined the unequal imperial relationship as rule by consensus.