Hello all! I am Jeremy Sontchi, one of the research assistants for the Nile History Initiative.
As a part of the historical research team based at Yale under Professor Joseph Manning, along with Joe Morgan and Nazim Can Serbest, I was involved with the preparatory work for the major historical studies that we intend to complete through the project. Our goal for the first year, from the historical side, was to create the database framework and begin collecting data for our historical archives and to compile our “paleo proxy records,” material that can be analyzed as indicators of the Nile flood. I worked towards both of these goals in a variety of ways.
Building Datasets
The first task was to assist in a historiographic survey to locate datasets and resources that we may be able to integrate into our project. I was aided in this by the fact that the Hellenistic period of Egyptian history is heavily studied academically. While there has been little public attention on the Ptolemaic period as popular culture has favored the well-known settings of Greece and Rome or the alluring mysticism of the pharaohs, within the field of ancient history, the number of people working on this period is actually disproportionately large because of the survival of so many documents compared to the documentary silence of the other Hellenistic kingdoms. This meant that there were numerous academic works to be read through in search of potential data or useful archives or research corpora, including PhD theses, conference proceedings, and academic monographs. Shortening my job was the novelty of ancient climate science as a field, which meant works were relatively scarce, especially in our constrained time period.
After the historiographical survey was completed, I turned towards assisting Joe and Nazim in compiling our paleo proxy database. Through the hard work of our researchers, as well as earlier projects, we created an extensive list of Egyptian papyri of specific, useful types, notably documents of leases and sales of land.
Papyrus plant (Univ. of Michigan Library)
The most important primary sources for any work on Ptolemaic Egypt are papyri. An ancient documentary material with properties and uses similar to those of paper, papyrus was the bureaucratic lifeblood of ancient Egypt. Constructed out of beaten together papyrus reeds, it is a sturdy material when new, but can decay easily in moisture and become incredibly brittle and fragile when dry. The desert surrounding the Nile Valley is the perfect preservation medium as the heat and dryness keep away any form of decay.
Layering of papyrus stalk strips (Univ. of Michigan)
Papyri are catalogued not by type or date, but by excavating or publishing party, which makes them quite difficult and often frustrating to study. For example, the papyrus P. Yale 1 51 is the 51st papyrus published in Yale volume 1. In addition to its publication designation, p.yale.1.51, it has an HGV designation, HGV P.Yale 1 51, a Trismegistos number, TM 2974, an APIS catalog number, yale.apis.0002370000, and a Yale library call number, P.CtYBR inv. 237 qua. This document is specifically a Greek language land lease contract dating from April 11, 184 BC and originating from Kerkesoucha in the Arsinoite nome, an Egyptian administrative subunit. There is a significant lack of useful information in the cataloguing typology of papyri, making initial judgements difficult. Fortunately, several large online databases exist, notably Trismegistos and papyri.info, that compile papyri with searchable metadata and allow easy compilation of research corpora. In addition, academics will occasionally produce works that include compilations of all papyri of a given topic or sort. Our issue is that there is no good search filter in the metadata for identifying documents that have to do with the Nile flood: we have to make educated guesses about what document types stand a greater chance at preserving this information and stake a risk on diving into that corpus to find them. Sometimes they are not forthcoming, which is frustrating, but the exercise is always worth the time.
P. Yale 1 51 or P.CtYBR inv. 237 qua - Yale University Library
Dating Papyri
Roughly 4000 papyri can be dated to a specific period within the 300-year timespan of Ptolemaic rule: this constitutes about two-thirds of all published papyri from the Ptolemaic era. Of these 4000, even fewer can be dated to a specific year, and of these, there is often ambiguity caused by the dating system.
We take today’s common global calendar for granted – it wasn’t always like this! The inhabitants of Egypt used multiple dating systems during this period: a lunar calendar of Macedonian origin, the Egyptian solar calendar, and the fiscal calendar. Regardless of the calendar employed, the years were counted from the accession of the reigning monarch (in what are called "regnal years"). Unlike the system in use today, which counts time continuously from its origin point (January 1 of year 1 of the "Christian Era," itself a kind of regnal-year system associated with the "reign" of the Christian god), the Egyptian system renewed at the death of the monarch. This means that a document dated to "year 1" cannot be assigned on this basis to a single year: instead there are roughly twelve options (theoretically each of the Ptolemies had their own "year 1," the first full year of their reign, but some back-dated this year, and hence their regnal dates, to the day on which their father appointed them as joint sovereign--this was an exceptional situation). However, this hurdle is typically surmountable by the employment of paleographical, prosopographical, and historical criteria to the analysis of the document.
Paleography, Prosopography, and Historical Analysis
Paleography is the study of ancient handwriting. Because most documents from this period were written by trained scribes, their handwriting ("hand" for short) was characterized by a certain degree of uniformity. The closer the scribe was to the central administration, the more regular-looking their hand appears (this is the phenomenon of so called "chancery hands" used by specially trained state bureaucrats). As knowledge of Greek, the primary language of official written communication in Ptolemaic Egypt, spread, stylistic ticks in handwriting proliferate.
We can therefore date the hand in which a document is written according to the accumulation of these stylistic changes, which is sometimes enough evidence to allow us to identify the appropriate Julian year corresponding to the regnal date of the king (or queen) in question. The hand of a scribe writing under Ptolemy II appears very different than that of a scribe writing a century later under Ptolemy VI, so although these particular kings both ruled for several decades, we can typically distinguish between their regnal years on paleographical grounds. As a general rule, the lower the regnal year, the more difficult it is to precisely date a document using paleography to isolate the correct Julian year.
Papyrus from 252 BC, reign of Ptolemy II (P.Mich.inv. 3109)
Papyrus from 178 BC, reign of Ptolemy VI (P.Köln X Tafel XV–XVII)
Prosopography, or the identification and cataloguing of historical persons, provides another important angle for solving dating puzzle. Hundreds of personal names appear in the papyri, shared by thousands of distinct individuals. However, it is occasionally possible to identify specific individuals who lived and worked during a specific time in a specific location. If such an individual appears in a papyrus which poses a dating problem, then we can use the presence of this individual as grounds for narrowing the date range. Other historical phenomena, such as specific institutions like taxes and priesthoods, can be used in the same way.
Next Steps
Our data entry thus consists of taking large databases of papyri and filtering them down into ones relating to our specific time period and of the correct type (we initially focused on land leases and sales), before entering them into a database to be indexed by date and geotag with analysis sections. The analysis is just beginning, but it involves a reading of the papyrus text and fact of existence to infer the Nile flood quality.
My year working on the Nile History Initiative has been fascinating and educational. It is really interesting to see a multidisciplinary research project taking shape and getting underway from close-up.
Author: Jeremy Sontchi, Undergraduate Research Assistant (Yale University)