CHAPTER IX

DEMOTIC PAPYRI AND OSTRACA

BY WILHELM SPIEGELBERG

The two papyri which I propose to call in future Papyrus Carnarvon I and II are of great importance on account of their date.[21] They both bear the protocol of a local king who reigned in Upper Egypt under Ptolemaios Epiphanes (205-181 B.C.). The king is named Harmachis, and so far there are known to exist only three other contracts of his time, two in the Berlin Museum (Demotic Pap. Berlin, Nos. 3142-4, 3145), dated in his third and sixth years, and another mentioned in the _Revue Égyptologique_, I, p. 121 (the collection in which it is preserved not being mentioned), is dated in his fifth year.

The two Carnarvon papyri are dated in the fourth year, and their protocol reads: ‘Year 4 in the month of Athyr of King Harmachis, living eternally, beloved of Isis, beloved of Amonrasonter, the great god.’

In the first papyrus (Pap. Carnarvon I, Pls. XXXV, XXXVI) a woman Senobastis sells 1½ cubits of waste land (about 40 square metres), situated in the endowed land of the god Amon near a place P-ohi-n-p-mehen, to a herdsman (?) and slave of the god Amon, Psenesis.

The second papyrus (Pap. Carnarvon II, Pls. XXXVIII, XXXIX) concerns a sale of arable land in the same region between the herdsman (?) and slave of the god Amon, Pachnumis and Paos bearing the same titles.

Paos and Psenesis were brothers, a fact which makes the two papyri part of the acts of the same family. They are signed by the same public notary, ‘Petamenophis, the son of Petemestus, ... who writes in the name of the priests of the god Amonrasonter,’ and among the sixteen witnesses on the verso of the papyri eleven are identical in both texts (Pl. XXXVII. 1 and 2).

These two documents concern two different sales of temple land in the same Theban region between different contractors, of whom two are members of the same family. As we know that in Ptolemaic and Roman times every sale was concluded by two documents, the agreement for sale (συγγραφἠ πρἁσεως) and the contract of cession (συγγραφἠ ἁποστασἱου), it is evident that we have only half of the complete acts of the two sales, viz. the sale agreements. Now in Pap. Carnarvon I on the right margin opposite line 4 there is a part of a sign (not given in the plate) which may be the end of a line of another text. This may belong to the lost contract of cession written upon the same roll as the existing written agreement. At any rate the two documents are not complete, they are only the sale agreements, and their juridical complements, i.e. the Cession Acts, may still turn up some day.

OSTRACA.

Among the thirty-three demotic ostraca, i.e. demotic inscriptions upon potsherds and limestone flakes, found among the Ptolemaic remains in the upper stratum of Site 14, and all of the Ptolemaic period, only one has a definite date.

It is of ‘the year 21 of the kings Ptolemaios son of Ptolemaios and of Ptolemaios, his son,’ i. e. of Ptolemaios II, Philadelphos, and his son Euergetes I (about 265-264 B.C.). The texts contain tax receipts, contracts, accounts, and lists of workmen.

One ostracon is of a quite unusual type (Pl. XXXVII. 3). Perhaps it is the receipt for the fee of a contract concerning a sale of land; the text is signed by Thothmosis, and has the date of ‘the year 4 the 30th (?) Choiak’.