Hannah M. Cotton

The Guardianship of Jesus Son of Babatha: Roman and Local Law in the Province of Arabia

The Babatha archive contains documents of a Jewish woman who lived in the village of Maoza situated on the southern shore of the Dead Sea, in what had been the kingdom of Nabataea and became in 106 C.E. the Roman province of Arabia. The first dated document in the archive dates to 22 Elul (August/September) 94 and the last to 19 August 132; some of the documents therefore precede the annexation of Arabia, but the majority follow it. This offers a rare opportunity to examine the consequences of Roman annexation: by examining in detail the changes effected by the Roman presence in the newly acquired province of Arabia, we may improve our picture of Roman provincial government and the relationship between Roman law and native local law, as well as our understanding of the reaction of the provincial population to Roman rule.

The Papyrology of the Roman Near East: A Survey

Not all students of the Roman world may have realized that, following extensive discoveries in the last few years, Egypt has ceased to be the only part of the Empire from which there are now substantial numbers of documentary texts written on perishable materials. This article is intended as a survey and hand-list of the rapidly-growing ‘papyrological’ material from the Roman Near East. As is normal, ‘papyrology’ is taken to include also any writing in ink on portable, and normally perishable, materials: parchment, wood, and leather, as well as on fragments of pottery ( ostraka ). The area concerned is that covered by the Roman provinces of Syria (divided in the 190s into ‘Syria Coele’ and ‘Syria Phoenice’); Mesopotamia (also created, by conquest, in the 190s); Arabia; and Judaea, which in the 130s became ‘Syria Palaestina’. These administrative divisions are valid for the majority of the material, which belongs to the first, second and third centuries. For the earlier part of the period we include also papyri from Dura under the Parthian kings (Nos 34, 36–43 , and 166 ), since they belong to the century before the Roman conquest and illustrate the continuity of legal and administrative forms; and five papyri from the kingdom of Nabataea, which after its ‘acquisition’ in 106 was to form the bulk of the new province of Arabia, on the grounds that in some sense dependent kingdoms were part of the Empire (Nos 180–184 ). Both groups are listed in brackets. We also include the extensive material from the first Jewish revolt (Nos 230–256 ) and from the Bar Kochba war of 132–5 (Nos 293–331 ), even though it derives from regimes in revolt against Rome. The private-law procedures visible in the Bar Kochba documents are continuous with those from the immediately preceding ‘provincial’ period (that of the later items in the ‘archive of Babatha’ and other documents). What changes dramatically after the outbreak of the revolt is language use: Hebrew now appears alongside Aramaic and Greek. But even as late as the third year of the revolt we find contracts in Aramaic. Our list at this point will supplement and correct that given by Millar in The Roman Near East , App. B.

A Cancelled Marriage Contract from the Judaean Desert ( XHev/Se Gr. 2 )

With the publication of the Greek part of the Babatha Archive in 1989 and some of the documents from the Greek-Syriac archives of Mesopotamia and the Middle Euphrates in 1989–1991, the contribution of perishable material from places other than Egypt to the study of the Roman Near East and the Roman Empire in general has become obvious. But this is just the tip of an iceberg that has been surfacing for a while. The parchments and papyri from Dura Europus, discovered in the 1920s, were published in final form in 1959: they range from the first century C.E. to the middle of the third century C.E. with texts mainly in Latin and Greek, a few in Aramaic and Iranian and one in Syriac.

Caesarea and the middle coast, 1121-2160

The second volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae covers the inscriptions of Caesarea Maritima and the coastal region of the Middle Coast from Tel Aviv in the south to Haifa in the north from the time of Alexander to the Muslim conquest. The approx. 1,050 texts comprise all the languages used for inscriptions during this period (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, Samaritan, Syrian, and Persian) and are arranged according to the principal settlements and their territory. The great majority of the texts belongs to Caesarea, the capital of the province of Judaea/Syria Palaestina. No other place in Judaea has produced more Latin inscriptions than this area, reflecting the strong Roman influence on the city.

2 The Earliest Attestation of the Dhimma of God and His Messenger and the Rediscovery of P. Nessana 77 (60s ah/680 ce)

Excavations in the village of Nessana, in southern Israel/Palestine, by the American Colt Expedition in the 1930s brought to light a corpus of papyri that comprise almost 200 documents as well as a number of literary and theological items. They were found in two caches in two separate churches, that of the Theotokos in the south of the village and that of Saints Sergius and Bacchus to the north. The texts span the sixth and seventh centuries and so are able to reveal to us aspects of the life of this community both before and after the Arab conquests. There are about 40 papyri pertaining to the Islamic period, dealing with taxation, compulsory service, farming, provisioning of the army, and personal matters. One of the papyri, numbered 77, was mislaid and so was not transported to America with the rest of the corpus. The Greek text (Fig. 2.1) on one side of it was published on the basis of a photograph, but the Arabic text (Fig. 2.2) that was on the other side was not published, though the editors do not explain why.2 Presumably it made its way to the Rockefeller Museum, where most ancient artifacts were stored at that time, and there slumbered in obscurity until it was rediscovered by Professor Hannah Cotton in the course of a cataloging exercise (see appendix below). The Arabic text comprises two letters, the significance of which I shall first discuss before proceeding to present their edition and translation.

Introduction: documentary evidence, social realities and the history of language

Few collections of papers could claim to represent more emphatically than this one does a whole series of changes of focus which mark the evolution of ancient history over the last few decades. First, it is based almost entirely on documents, whether preserved on perishable materials or on stone; the literary texts transmitted in manuscript, and printed since the early modern period, on which our conceptions of the ancient world were previously based, have receded into the background. Second, its focus is on the eastern Mediterranean, taking the ‘Near East’ in a relatively broad sense, including both Anatolia and Egypt. Th ird, while not exploring Hellenism in the sense of the period between Alexander and Actium, it takes as its starting point the dominant Greek culture of the eastern Mediterranean under the Roman Empire. Fourth, its essential focus is on language – or co-existing or competing languages. Th at is to say both, on the one hand, that it explores the potential of original documents to represent for us the realities of the societies by and from which they were generated, and that, at the same time, it accepts always that a ‘document’ is, just like a literary text, a construct following rules and conventions – or obeying a ‘rhetoric’ of genre – and is not, and cannot be, a simple mirror of ‘how it really was’. But the focus on language also means something more complex still, namely the situations which evolve when more than one language is (in some sense) current within a particular society. To take only the crudest of alternatives, if only one language is actually represented in the documentation available from a particular place and time, should we follow the principles of empiricism, and (at the weakest) adopt the working hypothesis that only that language was current? Or are we entitled to ‘read’ the available documents in the light of a presumption that some other language was normally spoken, but not written, or at least not used for the production of offi cial public texts? Finally, this volume is characterised above all, after two contrasting initial explorations of the role of Latin in the Greek East, by its focus