Steve Murray
HIST 0647
Spring 1999
Ernst Posner, "Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt" in Archives in
the Ancient World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 136-59.
The Ptolemaic Greeks and the Romans continued and enhanced archival practices
developed under the Egyptian pharaohs with the effect of creating "a
nearly perfect example of a bureaucratic autocracy whose functioning was
based on intensive use and remarkable care of the written record."
Egypt's status as a particularly wealthy and profitable corner of the Greco-Roman
empires is evidenced by the government's efforts to maintain an efficient
network of archives that operated at the village, regional, and state levels.
The Ptolemies inherited a mature administrative system for public records,
to which they added a system for the preservation of private property records.
The Romans further centralized records administration and separated the
function of public archives from that of property record offices.
Structure of archives system determined by pharaohic administration:
- region (nomes)
- district (topos)
- village (kômê)
Contributions of the Ptolemies:
- administrative skill and technology (papyrus used in large quantities)
- large clerical staff to keep the daybooks and correspondence of administrative
officials; accountants and "counter-scribes" to check and double-check
accuracy
- systematic documentation of private transactions: the six-witness contract
(prepared in duplicate); chirograph (informal deed of hand); diagraphê
trapezês (prepared by owner of a bank)
- system for officially registering transactions - village repository
(grapheion) administered by notary or other professional, perhaps on a
commission basis; every four months each office had to create composite
roll of records received, to condense their contents in abstracts, and
to prepare a chronological list (anagraphê) that would provide basic
information without unrolling originals; anagraphê was further summarized
in chronological register.
Contributions of the Romans:
- registry office in the chancery of the prefect in Alexandria organized
records by type into rolls and kept commentarii (daybooks) of official
transactions with copies of outgoing correspondence; proairetês (reference
staff) presented the daybooks up request after they had been accessioned
by the prefectorial record office
- commentarii were also kept by the strategos (chief civil and military
officer) of each nome, with copies deposited in both the regional archives
and the central archives in Alexandria
- established regional state archives in the capital of each nome to
house official copies of records from village archives
- established in each nome capital separate property record offices to
distinguish their function from that of public archives; both probably
functioned as subdivisions of the same agency, each headed by an appointed
archivist
- established diastromata (abstracts) of property records arranged by
village and alphabetically by property owners, which provided better control
than the chronological anagraphê developed by the Ptolemies
- central archives in Alexandria included the Patrika (public records)
and the Hadriane and the Nanaion (property records); physical control of
records maintained with niches or pigeonholes in the walls
- archives of family records and social clubs also survive, indicating
the significance of recordkeeping for the entire society