Reporting Thieves in Roman Egypt
Creators: name: Upton, Henry
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Theft
subject: Papyri
subject: Egypt
subject: Rome
subject: Petitions
subject: Classical Studies
subject: Humanities
subject: FOS: Humanities

description: Theft petitions from Roman Egypt provide a window into the law, administration, and social history of the province. Despite rich evidence and longstanding scholarly interest in petitioning, the existing research on theft petitions remains relatively thin. In the following study, I contextualize theft petitions within the broader Roman-Egyptian legal system, paying close attention to the language that scribes used to depict theft, what remedies were available to victims, and how the Egyptian administration was equipped to handle this quotidian problem. Petitions are appeals written on papyrus, asking officials for remedies or answers to contested legal questions. Told from the claimant’s first-person perspective in Greek, petitions occasionally come in the form of elaborate narratives, revealing shocking allegations and sophisticated legal strategies. Nevertheless, I argue that most petitions for theft were not intended to be personal accounts of injury. Through predictable narrative arcs and evocative stock phrases, theft petitions were ways for the Egyptian administration to communicate internally and to justify the sorts of invasive interventions needed to remediate victims when they had lost property without justification. Putting myself in dialogue with the recent work of Benjamin Kelly, Ari Bryen, and Roberto Mascellari, I attempt to bridge apparent divides in their arguments on petitions. Relying on Kelly and Bryen, I take an expansive view of the various aims of claimants who submitted petitions, understanding that petitioning and litigating were distinct facets of a broad array of social controls, and that petitionary language, no matter how boilerplate, could have had an empowering effect for injured victims. On the other hand, I take from Mascellari a more systematic view of the way these documents were created, preferring to see the final documents as scribal labor, not personal appeals, for an administration that preserved paper trails and protected the interests of its agents. In chapters dedicated to comparative legal analysis, petitionary language, and administrative history, I examine vocabulary and systems associated with theft petitions. After an introduction to the material in Chapter 1, in Chapter 2, I analyze different legal regimes for theft from around the ancient Mediterranean, supplementing what little we know about formal law from Egypt with evidence from related cultures. In Chapter 3, I examine the nature of nome police administrations and explain the purpose of the exaggerated rhetoric of theft petitions, particularly the bandit trope, which implied the necessity for state force. In Chapters 4 and 5, I examine theft petitions from the Roman period (30 BCE – 284 CE), divided chronologically at the reign of Hadrian (beginning in 117 CE), making note of their various functions and the changing shape of the Egyptian administration. Ultimately, I argue that with rare exceptions, theft law in Egypt was the remit of scribes, local officials, and low-level courts. Most claimants sought restitution and perhaps a minor punishment for their opponents. They relied on scribes to translate their grievance into the proper form. Few cases ever went beyond the nome or even the city where the offense occurred. Officials in each rung, from village police to the nome governor, knew their jobs and did not need to be persuaded to act by boilerplate rhetoric. Instead, they needed permission. Petitions should be read as attempts to grant that permission, relying on conventional narratives that, above all, sought to legitimize (and defend) subsequent steps by officials.