This volume is a Festschrift in honour of Sven Vleeming containing the contributions of thirty-eight friends and colleagues, often renowned specialists in their respective fields. It includes the editions of fifty-four new texts from Ancient Egypt that date from the 7th century BCE to the 2nd century CE and covers a very wide range of subjects in (Abnormal) Hieratic, Demotic and Greek papyrology. As such, it reflects the equally wide range of knowledge of the scholar to whom this book is dedicated.

This book gives a structured account of Egypt's transition from Ptolemaic to Roman rule by identifying key relationships between ecology, land tenure, taxation, administration and politics. It introduces theoretical perspectives from the social sciences and subjects them to empirical scrutiny using data from Greek and Demotic papyri as well as comparative evidence. Although building on recent scholarship, it offers some provocative arguments that challenge prevailing views. For example, patterns of land ownership are linked to population density and are seen as one aspect of continuity between the Ptolemaic and Roman period. Fiscal reform, by contrast, emerges as a significant mechanism of change not only in the agrarian economy but also in the administrative system and the whole social structure. Anyone seeking to understand the impact of Roman rule in the Hellenistic east must consider the well-attested processes in Egypt that this book seeks to explain.

Scribes are paradoxically both central and invisible in most societies before the typographic revolution of the 15th century, witnessed by every manuscript, but often elusive as historical figures. The act of writing is a quotidian and vernacular practice as well as a literary one, and must be observed not only in the outputs of literary copyists or reports of their activities, but in the documents of everyday life. This volume collects contributions on scribal practice as it features on diverse media (including papyri, tablets, and inscriptions) in a range of ancient societies, from the Ancient Near East and Dynastic Egypt through the Graeco-Roman world to Byzantium. These discussions of the role and place of scribes and scribal activity in pre-typographic cultures both contribute to a better understanding of one of the key drivers of these cultures, and illuminate the transmission of knowledge and traditions within and between them.

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

Throughout Egypt’s long history, pottery sherds and flakes of limestone were commonly used for drawings and short-form texts in a number of languages. These objects are conventionally called ostraca, and thousands of them have been and continue to be discovered. This volume highlights some of the methodologies that have been developed for analyzing the archaeological contexts, material aspects, and textual peculiarities of ostraca.

Die zu Ehren von Karl-Theodor Zauzich verfasste Festschrift enthalt 37 Beitrage mit der Erstedition von ca. 80 uberwiegend demotischen Texten sowie der Neubearbeitung weiterer, ebenfalls meist demotischer Quellen. Auch zweisprachige Texte sind vertreten. Thematisch handelt es sich um Briefe, Orakelfragen, Urkunden, Lehrtexte, Ritualhandschriften, funerare Texte, Erzahlungen, Inventarlisten, Abrechnungen und Steuerquittungen auf Ostraka, Stein, Holz und Papyrus sowie Graffiti. Chronologisch reicht das Material von der Spatzeit bis in die romische Kaiserzeit und gibt dank der internationalen Herkunft der Autoren einen Querschnitt durch die aktuelle Demotistik. Andererseits wird durch diese Beitrage deutlich, welche Mengen noch unbearbeiteter demotischer Texte bereitliegen. Deren Erschliessung war schon immer und is bis heute ein Hauptanliegen des Jubilars. Ausfuhrliche Indizes zu den bearbeiteten und zitierten Texten, zu Gottern, Herrschern, Titeln, Namen, Toponymen und zu neuen agyptischen Wortern erlauben einen gezielten Zugriff auf das Material. XII + 744 S., 61 Taf., 1 Frontispiz; mit Bibliographie zu K.-Th. Zauzich.