Juristic Papyrology

The arbitration and settlement of claims in the Roman law have been the subject of multiple analyses. Recent years have witnessed a particular inter- est in the practical application of these institutions in Late Antiquity. At first sight, legal papyri may seem confusing and give the impression that they present solutions distant from the standard ones known from the compilations of the law. When one ventures to take a closer look, however, at the complex web of legal concepts and terms, one can notice the context in which the agreement is situated as well as the relations connecting both sides of the dispute. The present article offers a legal analysis of P. Mich. XIII 659, published in 1977, which concerns a dispute settled by means of mesiteia (i.e. mediation/arbitration). A plausible reconstruction of events is provided, which allows insight into the numerous correlations between the institutions as well as regulations known from the law on the one hand, and the legal practice as demonstrated by the papyri on the other. Finally, a short, polemical commentary is offered concerning the popularity of arbitration/mediation in Late Antiquity, a phenomenon frequently noted in literature.

In the frame of the discussion on the legal nature of the contractual clause ‘καθάπερ ἐκ δίκης’ (the most important legal formula used in Egyptian legal papyri during the Ro- man period) and on its hypothetical practical function, this paper offers what appears to be the first textual evidence of the executive legal effects of the clause.

A perspective on the nature of the Roman legal order in the provinces and the status of local laws and practices under Roman rule. These questions are explored through a series of case studies from Roman Egypt, including the well-known petition of Dionysia (P. Oxy. II 237).

The present book deals with the testamentary practice as seen through papyri, tablets, doctrinal and literary sources, manuscript tradition, etc. mostly in the period after the constitutio Antoniniana. The aim of Wills in the Roman empire: a documentary approach is to reconstruct how people applied law and how testamentary practice looked like in everyday life: how wills were made and opened, what was the meaning of particular dispositions. These questions constitute a part of a wider discussion concerning the level of knowledge and application of Roman law in the provinces after the edict of Caracalla. The book is supplemented with four Appendices, where all wills from the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods are collected for the first time in scholarly literature.

The present paper, inspired by the article of Peter van Minnen, is devoted to the somewhat curious use of the term falkidion in three Dioskorean texts. In two deeds of disinheritation, P.Cair.Masp. III 67353 & I 67097 v° D, the Aphrodite Lawyer seems to have confused two distinct legal terms: quarta Falcidia and the portio debita/legitima (νόμιμος μοῖρα). In the third case, a will (P.Cair.Masp. III 67312), the term falkidion was applied in its classically correct meaning. The scholarship usually deemed the Dioskorean misconception of falkidion to have resulted from the common error of the Byzantine jurisprudence which had apparently applied it wrongly to describe legitim. Peter van Minnen thought that the notary’s seeming imprecision was rather due to his up-to-date legal education, as the Justinianic jurisprudence would have implicitly equalled the two concepts. The research of the Byzantine juristic sources proves however, that the legal texts – especially these of the Justinian’s era – almost always keep a clear distinction between these two legal institutes. After an examination of the dubious cases, the postulated identification is only ascertained in case of two works of scholarly use, Epitomae Novellarum of Julian and of Athanasius of Emesa. Subsequently the confrontation of some pre-justinianic legal sources allows to formulate a hypothesis that the justinianic compilers tried to recover the original meaning of falkidion. This supposition, in turn, may not only provide for better understanding of Dioskoros’s juristic expertise and his practical activity, but also illustrate the apparent contradictions between the pure imperial law, the legal practice and the teaching of law, based – one may speculate – still after the codification upon the pre-codified version of the law.

La genesi del Digesto di Giustiniano coinvolge due aspetti, tecnico l'uno, l'altro culturale. Il profilo tecnico, ossia il metodo seguito dai compilatori per spogliare la letteratura giuridica e ricomporla in un'antologia, è il più esplorato, da Bluhme che lo chiarì in modo già pressoché definitivo nel 1820 a Honoré che, di recente, ha rinnovato le sue ipotesi circa la divisione e il ritmo di lavoro dei commissari. 1 Segnano il passo, invece, gli studi sulla genesi culturale, cioè sulle condizioni intellettuali che suggerirono e resero possibile un'operazione sofisticata quale fu compiuta, in breve tempo, dai commissari giustinianei. 2 Se una situazione di stallo storiografico ha un vantaggio, è che consente di prendere le distanze dalle opinioni e di riesaminare più liberamente l'impostazione data ai problemi. 3 Oltre alla dispersione delle fonti, su cui torneremo, a rendere impervia l'esplorazione delle premesse culturali dell'opera giustinianea è, infatti, lo stato della storiografia giuridica. Al tempo dell'interpolazionismo, il clima era per alcuni versi più favorevole (non sorprende che risalga a quella stagione il tentativo più ambizioso di spiegare la «genèse du Digeste»): 4 era l'ipotesi stessa che stava alla base di quel metodo, ossia che 1 T. HONORÉ, Justinian's Digest. Character and Compilation, Oxford 2010; il volume raccoglie i risultati di alcuni studi preliminari, sui quali avevo avuto modo di esprimere alcune osservazioni, alle quali rimando: ' legum compositio': la compilazione del Digesto di Giustiniano in una conversazione tra Tony Honoré e Dario Mantovani, in Alberico Gentili: l'uso della forza nel diritto internazionale. Atti del convegno, undicesima Giornata gentiliana, San Ginesio, 17-18 settembre 2004, Milano 2006, 295 ss., 324 ss.; Aggiornamenti sull'Appendix e i tempi di compilazione del Digesto, in Fides Humanitas Ius. Studii in onore di Luigi Labruna V, Napoli 2007, 3181 ss. 2 Ovviamente, oltre ad appoggiarsi su basi culturali, l'impresa di codificazione era mossa da volontà politica e da impulsi socio-economici (a cominciare dal desiderio di prolixitatem litium amputare: Const. Haec pr.), Sono fattori di grande rilievo per una valutazione complessiva dell'azione di Giustiniano, che esula tuttavia dalla presente ricognizione: per una messa a punto di questi aspetti, vd. per tutti J. HALDON, Economy and Administration: How Did the Empire Work?, in M. MAAS (a c. di), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, Cambridge et al. 2005, 28 ss. 3 Per un utile quadro bibliografico rinvio al recente volume di A.M. GIOMARO, Sulla presenza delle scuole di diritto e la formazione giuridica nel tardoantico, Soveria Mannelli 2011, spec. 13 ss. 4 P. COLLINET, Études historiques sur le droit de Justinien, I. Le caractère oriental de l'oeuvre législative de Justinien et les

The topic of listening to music, singing and instruments is one of those which many independent books and other, much more shorter works were written for. In this writing we focus on an important booklet which was written in the beginning of the 9th century of hiǧra.  The author is Ibn Jamāʿa, who was a well-known Shāfiʿī scholar from Egypt. As a son of an educated family, he is the last of the three persons in the family tree, wearing the name “Ibn Jamāʿa”. This booklet was written after the following of the four jurisprudential schools of thought and the opinions and methods of approaching this matter were settled, and after the position of the the scholars of fiqh and hadīth on the issue of music clarified itself between those allowed it, those who prohibited it and those who took a middle path in this issue.
Ibn Jamāʿa began his booklet with a declaration about listening to music being allowed basically, the prohibition of instruments and every kind of reprehensible acts coming along with it, and which kinds of instruments form an exception on the basis of clear textual evidences. The author didn’t make his stance on the tambourine (duff) clear, but it seems that he favored the opinion of tambourines being only allowed without zills. And it appears that he tends to the specification of this instrument (only) for women on weddings. Concerning the flute, he takes the position of an-Nawawī, meaning its prohibition, and that is also the authors stance on other instruments. As a conclusion the author reached to the opinion that the kind of music which was spread during his lifetime was prohibited due to the singing, instruments and reprehensible acts involved in it.
The reader of Ibn Jamāʿa’s booklet will realize, that what the author did was only choosing between the opinions of scholars before him, on top of them al-Adhraʿī, followed by as-Subkī, an-Nawawī, al-ʿIzz ibn Abd as-Salām and some others. Considering the process of verifying the proofs (taḥqīq) and choosing between the scholarly opinions (tarjīḥ) he also just transmitted the conclusions of other scholars. This fits into what was said about him in his biography of not being specialized in one of the islamic fields of knowledge, which in conclusion means that his booklet doesn’t bear a heavy weight from a perspective of islamic jurisprudence, rather its importance shows itself in his way of choosing opinions (tarǧīḥ). And in the way it influenced those who came after him. For example when the later Ibn Haǧar al-Haytamī integrated most of Ibn Jamāʿa’s booklet in his book “Kaff ar-riʿāaʿ fī muḥarramāt al-lahw wa as-samāʿ”, to which he added a bunch of information, verifying and correcting a lot of the mistakes found in the manuscript, and therefore he developed the small booklet into an independent and vast book, if he only had affirmed that clearly.
Al-Haytamī would transmit from al-Adhraʿī, as-Subkī and an-Nawawī in the same way and order Ibn Jamāʿa did. Sometimes he would add some phrases, on other occasions he would transmit it word by word, while the chosen opinions, were those chosen by Ibn Jamāʿa. Imām al-Haytamī chose the exact same order of the scholarly opinions mentioned by Ibn Jamāʿa and didn’t make any changes concerning the locations of those quotes through the entire book.
What this research did, was a critical editing of the booklet, because this work wasn’t done before, and the authors book hasn’t been published yet. It also added some matching studies, which consist of the context in which the booklet was compiled, the methods of the scholars in approaching this issue, the opinions of the scholars of fiqh and how they lent towards the prohibition of music being accompanied by prohibited elements. As for those allowing it, they did so under the condition of music being free from any of these elements. Even so, we find a high sensitivity of the fuqahāʾ approaching the matter of listening to music, they didn’t express the permissibility of music in an open way, due to its enormous effect on the human being, which may turn him away from the truth and leads him to deviation.
the research also discussed the thought of “noble music”, which we find in the gatherings of the Sūfīs, and about that kind of music which isn’t accompanied by prohibited acts like drinking alcohol and shameful immoralities, but this led to a new dimension of the issue, which is an ideological dimension, meaning that everyone standing against the Sūfīs in their school of thought, declared the prohibition of these gatherings and instruments.
Keywords: music, instruments, Ibn Jamāʿa, Ibn Hajar al-Haytamī, critical edition.

الملخص
مسألة السماع والغناء والمعازف من المسائل التي أفردت لها رسائل وكتب مستقلة، وهذه رسالة مهمة كُتبت في أوائل القرن التاسع الهجري من قبل أحد علماء هذا القرن وهو ابن جماعة، سليل عائلة علمية تحمل هذا اللقب، كُتبت بعد أن استقر التقليد الفقهي وتوضحت الآراء والمناهج الفقهية في مقاربة المسألة، وتوضح موقف الفقهاء والمحدثين من حكم السماع. فحققتُ هذه الرسالة التي لم تحقق بعد، وأضفت إليها الدراسة الملائمة لها، وهي سياق التأليف في مسألة السماع ومناهج العلماء في مقاربة المسألة، ثم في تحديد من هو المؤلف ومناقشة بعض الاحتمالات القائمة على ذلك، ثم ختمت بأهمية الرسالة ومدى تأثيرها على من ألف بعد الإمام ابن جماعة في المسألة، وعلى رأسهم الإمام ابن حجر الهيتمي الذي وظف الرسالة بأكملها في كتابه عن السماع.
كلمات مفتاحية: المعازف، الآلات الموسيقية، ابن جماعة، ابن حجر الهيتمي، تحقيق

ÖZ
Müzik dinleme ve çalgı aletleri konusu, hakkında müstakil risâle ve kitapların yazıldığı meselelerden biridir. Bu önemli risâle hicrî 9. yüzyılın başlarında dönemin âlimlerinden İbn Cemâ‘a tarafından telif edilmiştir. İbn Cemâ‘a, aynı lakabı taşıyan ilmî geleneğe mensup bir aileden gelmiştir. Fıkhî geleneğin istikrar bulmasının ardından kaleme alınan bu risâlede, konuyla ilgili görüşler, fıkhî yöntemler, fakih ve muhaddislerin müzik dinlemenin hükmü meselesinde benimsedikleri görüşler açıklanmıştır. Daha önce tahkik edilmemiş bu risâlenin tahkikine, müellifin konuyu ele aldığı bağlamı ve âlimlerin konuya yaklaşımlarını içeren bir araştırma (dirâse) ilave edilmiştir. Burada, müellifin kimliğinin tespiti ve bununla ilgili bazı tartışmalar da ele alınmıştır. Söz konusu araştırma, risâlenin önemi ve İbn Cemâ‘a’dan sonra bu konuda eser telif eden müelliflere etkisinin tespitiyle sona ermiştir. Müzik dinlemenin hükmü hakkındaki eserinde risâlenin tamamını nakleden İbn Hacer el-Heytemî bu müelliflerin başında gelmektedir.

The study addresses the legal rules that allowed in Rome and in some Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, especially Egypt, women to serve as guardians or to assist the guardian of their prepubescent children. In Rome, mothers as guardians are attested during the second century by individual imperial concession, and the mother as manager in aid to the guardian is amply attested in the classical age. In Egypt, mothers could serve as guardians, appointed by a private act of the husband (since the beginning of the province until 212 AD), while in connection to the guardian (with the name ἐπακολουθήτρια) they appear only from the first half of the second century ad. the author questions the mutual influences between the two sets of rules.

Nel presente articolo si esaminano le norme giuridiche in base alle quali a Roma e in alcune province orientali dell'impero romano, soprattutto l'Egitto, la madre poteva essere tutrice o poteva svolgere fuzioni di ausilio al tutore dei propri figli impuberi. A Roma la madre tutrice appare attestata già dal secondo secolo per concessione imperiale individuale, e la madre amministratrice in ausilio al tutore è ampiamente attestata in età classica. In Egitto la madre tutrice, nominata con atto privato del marito, compare dalle origini della provincia e fino al 212 d.C., mentre, affiancata al tutore, con il nome di ἐπακολουθήτρια, è documentata solo dalla prima metà del secondo secolo d.C. In dottrina ci si è interrogati circa le influenze reciproche tra i due sistemi di norme. L'autore conclude che è legittimo ipotizzare che la scomparsa della madre tutrice egizia dopo il 212 sia stata causata dalla diffusione del diritto romano nelle province a seguito della Constitutio Antoniniana, mentre non sembra possibile rinvenire altre reciproche influenze. In particolare, si nega che la madre amministratrice romana sia derivata dall'ἐπακολουθήτρια egizia.

"The main point is that when one takes into account what we know about ancient Egyptian mathematics (based primarily on the Rhind Papyrus) and what we know about the system of measuring lengths in terms of "cubits," "palms," and "fingers" , everything involves  the number 7 and its multiple.

Throughout the course of Western history, children born out of wedlock enjoyed neither the social nor legal standing of marital children. Being born out of wedlock caused complications in the lives of not only commoners, but even the elite. The question is whether these attitudes developed independently or if they had a common root. In branches of law regulating the relationships within a family, Roman law is the usual suspect as a kind of ‘ideal law’, which may be understood as a model for modern practices, not only in the scholarship, but even in judicial decisions. On the other hand, Christianity is often recognised as inspiration for model of family in the West. The primary aim of this book is, therefore, to reconstruct the Roman concept of bastardy and how that concept evolved between Augustus and Constantine the Great, who changed the standing of individuals born out of wedlock and shaped legal definitions of illegitimacy for the centuries to come. Although the study is focused on Roman Egypt, the conclusions reached in this book are relevant for the whole of the Roman empire.

This paper examines the Roman provincial law applied in papyrus BGU I 183. This is a double deed document which contains marriage agreement between full brother and sister, and property distribution made by their mother. The aim of the paper is to explain why the siblings made marriage agreement after 23 years of marriage, and to clarify the link between the two deeds.

Description and dating of both papyri. Commented re-edition of P. 16977. It preserves a fragment from Greek teaching of Roman Law in the fifth century AD, a part of an Index Lecture about the Diocletian law codes. There is dealt with the "non numerata pecunia", i. e. a credit has not been paid down by the creditor and he wants now his money back from the debtor.

This paper has been growing in layers. It started with a study of a deed of slave-sale preserved in the inexhaustible archives of Dioscoros. Naturally, I had to pay attention the meaning of the clauses the contract stipulated and so I studied its contemporary counterparts. In this way I came across the old, but still vivid, vexed question of the meaning of the word epaphe in the warranty clause. The second part of the article is entirely devoted to this question (sections 4 & 5), I hope to have been able to prove that its explanation offered in the most recent works of the subject cannot be accepted and so the case will finally rest, contrary the prophesy of Bernhard Kübler, who seems to have lost hope in any happy ending of the controversy, when he entitled his last piece on the question ‘Ἐπαφή ohne Ende?’ and ended it with a radical, yet, methinks pessimistic: ‘[i]ch schreib nicht aus Rechthaberei, sondern aus dem Drang, die Wahrheit zu erkennen und ihr zum Siege zu verhelfen’

Dieser Beitrag ist eine erweiterte Fassung des Vortrages, den die Autorin im Panel „The History of Writing Practices and Scribal Culture“ auf dem vom Comité Internationale des Sciences Historiques (CISH) veranstalte¬ten 22. internationalen Kongress für Geschichtswissenschaft gehalten hat, der vom 23. bis 29. August 2015 in Jinan, China, stattfand. Er befasst sich mit dem Urkundenwesen, wie es sich in der spätantiken römischen Welt herausgebildet und in den entstehenden Nachfolgestaaten weitergelebt hat. Dabei werden die in den Unterfertigungen vorhandenen nicht-alpha-betischen Zeichen bzw. graphischen Symbole dahingehend untersucht, ob und inwieweit in der pragmatischen Schriftlichkeit der nachrömischen westlichen Welt allgemeine Tendenzen festzustellen sind.

Table of contents

[Introduction]: pp. 11-16:
1. Sign of the cross and related Christian symbols in the late Roman writing practices of daily life: pp. 17-20;
2. The sign of the cross as writing practice of illiterates: pp. 20-23;
3. In the name of crucified Jesus: staurogram in autograph subscriptions: pp. 23-29;
4. Writing in a different way: shorthand and other graphic signs as ending marks in autograph subscriptions: pp. 30-32;
5. The late antique ΧΜΓ and the ‘doodles’ of the Early Middle Ages: pp. 32-40.

The present article deals with the presence of fatherless individuals – χρηματίζοντες μητρός – in the Oxyrhynchite corn dole archive (P. Oxy. XL). It examines how and why these individuals were admitted to the corn dole distribution in the group of homologoi; it also offers new observations regarding both the homologoi and epikrithentes.

The article is a re-edition of a papyrus published in the fourth volume of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri as a descriptum. It is a second-century will made for a female testator in Oxyrhynchos. One of the dispositions preserved in this text draws attention as it resembles the Roman legatum per praeceptionem, although the will was made for a peregrine.

NOTAE. NoT A writtEn word but graphic symbols NOTAE: An evidence-based reconstruction of another written world in pragmatic literacy from Late Antiquity to early medieval Europe.
ERC-2017-ADG Project N° 786572.
Principal Investigator: Antonella Ghignoli, Sapienza Università di Roma.

Journal of Juristic Papyrology 44 (2014), 93-115.

Publication and discussion of two late Ptolemaic loans with peculiar omissions. Both have a large blank space where the body contract would normally be written and lack the acknowledgment of the syngraphophylax and mention of witnesses. Further, the lender's name is omitted in both cases. Nevertheless, the contracts were registered in their respective writing offices of Euhemeria and Theadelphia. The article treats the mechanics behind these diplomatic oddities and argues that they were considered valid contracts in the eyes of those involved, even if they violated royal administrative law. An appendix lists contracts registered in local writing offices despite missing or incomplete body contracts.

The study of the demographic characteristics of the first Mediterranean global network, the Roman Empire, is not an easy task. There are a lot of aspects to consider and an almost equal number of factors affecting them. In addition, the possible sources of information used to be incomplete and biased. Although methodology for conducting this kind of studies has evolved through time, allowing us to extract and to interpret the data in a better way, some aspects remain still obscure. [Contrib Sci

While focusing on the issues such as spirituality, faith, prayer, and discipline, the late antique literary discourse pays little attention to the engagement of monks in the mundane realities of daily life. The symbolic sig- nificance of the total withdrawal from the earthly matters have paved its way into common imagination of the monastic existence. One must, however, remain cautious while attempting to translate monastic writings into the reality of day-to-day life of a monk in Egypt. As shown by numerous papyri, social and economic relations between monks and the surrounding world were not sporadic, but an inevitable element of the monastic movement. The picture of Egyptian monasticism depicts a web of contacts with the ‘outside world’ and an entanglement of religious landscape in the local economy. In this article, I discuss only one aspect of the much broader issue, that is the existence of ‘legal capacity’ of monastic communities in late antique Egypt. I address the problem of ‘legal representation’ of monasteries as outlined in the sources of legal practice. For a lawyer, these observations are all the more stimulating as there has been an ongoing debate whether ‘legal per- sons’ as such existed at all in Roman law, and whether we could talk about anything approaching our current understanding of ‘legal personality’.

The main problem discussed in this paper is illegitimacy in Roman Egypt. In the first part of the text I discuss ways of presenting persons born out of wedlock in papyri, especially documents relating to Roman census in Egypt. The question posed in the second part of the article is whether ways of describing extramarital children could provide us with information concerning their position within the family structure of Roman Egypt.

Volume realizzato con l'intervento della Scuola di Giurisprudenza dell'Università di Camerino e del «Consorzio interuniversitario Gérard Boulvert per lo studio della civiltà giuridica europea e per la storia dei suoi ordinamenti» nell'àmbito della Convenzione con il Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche.

Re-edition of PSI I 55. A Greek papyrus fragment from Roman Law teaching on Justinian's Digest (D. 2, 14, de pactis) will be identified as part of a paraphrasis, a combination of two lectures (before March 536 CE), an Index lecture, representing the Latin text in Greek, and a paragraphaí lecture with Greek commentaries to the Latin text. Teacher of the two lessons was one of Justinian's Antecessors, perhaps in the Law School of Beirut.

Edition of P.Tebt. II 517 from Tebtunis, II CE. The text recorded belongs to a type of wills known as donatio mortis causa, a division (μεριτεία) or cession (συγχώρημα) of property after the donor’s death (μετὰ τὴν τελευτήν). It is the typically Egyptian form of will written in the form of contract (ὁμολογία) either independently or attached to a marriage agreement (συγγραφοδιαθήκη).

The paper aims to examine the names applied to illegitimate children in Roman Egypt between the first and third centuries, that is to provide descriptions of those children who appear in the papyri and to determine their chronology and provenance. More importantly, it will attempt the statement that bastardy in Egypt was a Roman concept influencing only soldiers’ families, and to resolve the question of whether the terms used in papyri to indicate illegitimate children were legal and formal categories or whether they were used only to distinguish individuals.