What is called the Petra archive or Petra papyri is a group of ca. 140 carbonized papyrus rolls found in 1993 in a room adjacent to the main Byzantine church of Petra. The documents date from the 6th century. They are private papers of a well-to-do local family, mainly financial documents concerning marriage, inheritance, sales, loans and disputes, but also documents connected with taxation. The documents are written in Greek. The Petra Papyri are one of the most important finds of ancient documentary texts ever made outside of Egypt.

What is called the Petra archive or Petra papyri is a group of ca. 140 carbonized papyrus rolls found in 1993 in a room adjacent to the main Byzantine church of Petra. The documents date from the 6th century. They are private papers of a well-to-do local family, mainly financial documents concerning marriage, inheritance, sales, loans and disputes, but also documents connected with taxation. The documents are written in Greek. The Petra Papyri are one of the most important finds of ancient documentary texts ever made outside of Egypt.

Thousands of documentary and literary texts written on papyri and potsherds, in Egyptian, Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Persian, have transformed our knowledge of many aspects of life in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. Here experts provide a comprehensive guide to understanding this ancient documentary evidence.

This book promotes the study of material spatiality in late antiquity: not just the study of buildings, but of the people, dress and objects used within them, drawing on all available source material. It seeks to explore the material world as it was lived in late antiquity, in an interpretative inquiry, rather than simply describing the evidence that has survived until today. The volume presents a series of comprehensive bibliographic essays which provide an overview of relevant literature, along with discussions of the nature of the sources, of relevant approaches and field methods. The main section of the book explores domestic space, vessels in context, dress, shops and workshops, religious space, and military space. Synthetic papers drawing on a wide range of archaeological, art-historical and textual sources are complemented by case-studies of context-rich late antique sites in the East Mediterranean and elsewhere, including Pella, Dura-Europos, Scythopolis, and Sagalassos.

This volume brings together studies which relate to the interpenetration of Semitic and Greco-Roman traditions of papyrus writing in the antique Middle East.

Shows that law it is often better understood as an entangled web rather than as a coherent, orderly system.