Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)--Duke University, 2005, under the title Policing the chora: law enforcement in Ptolemaic Egypt.

This book investigates the law enforcement system of Ptolemaic Egypt (323-30 BC).

The first economic history of ancient Egypt employing a New Institutional Economics approach and covering the entire pharaonic period, 3000-30 BCE.

The first detailed description of when and how the police may use force under the international law of law enforcement.

An analysis of the legal reasoning of the Jews who petitioned the leaders of a Jewish πολίτευμα in Hellenistic Egypt, this study reveals that the petitioners relied in heretofore unrecognized ways on Jewish norms—the Torah—to make their appeals.

How ancient Mediterranean trade thrived through state institutions From around 700 BCE until the first centuries CE, the Mediterranean enjoyed steady economic growth through trade, reaching a level not to be regained until the early modern era. This process of growth coincided with a process of state formation, culminating in the largest state the ancient Mediterranean would ever know, the Roman Empire. Subsequent economic decline coincided with state disintegration. How are the two processes related? In Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean, Taco Terpstra investigates how the organizational structure of trade benefited from state institutions. Although enforcement typically depended on private actors, traders could utilize a public infrastructure, which included not only courts and legal frameworks but also socially cohesive ideologies. Terpstra details how business practices emerged that were based on private order, yet took advantage of public institutions. Focusing on the activity of both private and public economic actors—from Greek city councilors and Ptolemaic officials to long-distance traders and Roman magistrates and financiers—Terpstra illuminates the complex relationship between economic development and state structures in the ancient Mediterranean.

This is a reprint of Naphtali Lewis' important book on the uses of papyrus records reconstructing life in ancient Egypt. Published in 1986, the first edition of Greeks in Ptolemaic Egypt complemented Life in Egypt under Roman Rule' (reprinted in 1999 as Classics in Papyrology 1') by providing a perspective on the earlier period.