01. Archives and archival documents in ancient societies

An verschiedenen Orten insbesondere in Ägypten, aber auch in Palästina, wurden aramäische Dokumente gefunden, die aus der Zeit des achämenidischen Reiches stammen. Von diesen wurden einige ursprünglichen Archiven zugeordnet, wobei die Zuordnung häufig auf Grund inhaltlicher Argumente vorgenommen wurde und die Frage, in den Hintergrund trat, ob die jeweiligen so erschlossenen Archive auch auf Grund ihrer Fundumstände eine Einheit bildeten. Es liegt auf der Hand, dass eine inhaltliche Analyse solcher sekundär erschlossenen Archive letztlich nur das ergeben kann, was die modernen Forschung als ein Archiv konstituierend vorausgesetzt hat. Der vorliegende Beitrag, der sich der Frage widmet, welche Dokumente Bestandteil eines Archivs war und was dies für die Funktion solcher Archive bedeutet, berücksichtig jedoch nur solche Dokumente, deren Zugehörigkeit zu einem bestimmten Archiv sich auf Grund der Fundumstände mit hinreichender Sicherheit wahrscheinlich machen lässt. Den so erschlossenen Archiven aus Ägypten – das des Jedanja (traditionell der Mibtahja, TAD B2.2-4+6-11), des Anani und seiner Frau Jehoišma (TAD B3.2-13) und des Nahthor (TAD A6.3-16) – werden neben den Texten vom Wadi Daliye auch die Schriftrollen an die Seite gestellt, die Abschriften ursprünglich eigenständiger Dokumente enthalten und somit auch ein Art Archiv darstellen. Eine kritische Durchsicht der Dokumente ergibt ein erstaunlich eindeutiges Bild: In den Archiven werden nur Dokumente aufbewahrt, die für den Besitzer des Archivs von unmittelbarer Bedeutung sind. So enthalten die Archive der Privatpersonen grundsätzlich nur Dokumente, die für ihre Rechts- und Besitzansprüche bedeutsam sind, das Briefarchiv des Beamten Nahthor nur Briefe, die im Hinblick auf seinen Amt und seine Dienstgeschäfte Bedeutung haben. Auch die Texte vom Wadi Daliye, die möglicherweise einem institutionellem Archiv zuzuschreiben sind, betreffen im Wesentlichen nur den Problembereich des Besitzstandes an Unfreien und zuweilen an Immobilien. Das Ergebnis, dass die Archivtexte für den aktuellen Archivbesitzer von konkreter Bedeutung waren, spiegelt sich auch darin, dass die Texte eines Archivs nur aus einem überschaubaren Zeitraum von kaum mehr als 60 Jahren, in den meisten Fällen aber deutlich weniger, stammen. Dementsprechend wurden auch die Sammelrollen offenkundig nach einem relativ kurzen Zeitraum obsolet.

This book, part of a series aiming to investigate the legal systems of ancient societies through a document-based, comparative approach, focuses on the study of archives and archival records and their interplay with the workings of administrative and political systems. The papers are arranged in four sections dealing with the Ancient Near East, Classical Greece, the Persian Tradition and the Hellenistic World, and the Roman Empire. The themes touched upon chronologically span from the early second millennium B.C. to the late Roman Empire and geographically range from Mesopotamia to the Western Mediterranean. The archives considered, public and private, are conspicuous for their variety and reflect diverse archival concepts and traditions but a number of common patterns also emerge in respect to their physical organization, to the classification of texts, the function of record-keeping and the role of seals. We are entitled to speak of a recurring ‘archival behaviour’.

In this chapter, I explore the relationship between the forms of Athenian building accounts as presented by relevant officials at their annual euthynae, as deposited in a state archive on perishable materials, and as carved on marble in public places. Various forms and probable purposes of inscribed building documents are discussed, with particular attention given to the factors behind preserving or omitting the names of workers. As is well known, the Periclean inscriptions mention no builders' names and very few construction details. In contrast, minute recording of what was done and by whom is, on the face of it, a salient feature of the accounts of the Erechtheion, whereas the Eleusinian documents mention dozens of names, but selectively, as will be shown. In my talk, I tried to establish the following arguments: a) While the form of each building inscription may have correlated with the purpose of its erection, it depended heavily on sources available. Due to the euthynae, financial accounts were always there, whilst no other relevant document may have existed. b) Accordingly, even if commemorating the builders' names may have been one of the reasons for engraving the accounts from the Erechtheion and Eleusis (as well as from Epidaurus and Delos), this aim has been only partially achieved, as I shall argue. I argue that the anonymous workmen at the Erechtheion and Eleusis were unnamed in the original documents, and perhaps it was true for earlier projects, too. The authorities did not go out of their way to find out information, absent from financial accounts, even where it could have been obtained relatively easily. Finally, I discuss broader implications of these conclusions as to the role of archives and documents in classical Athens.

It is well known that the Romans established in Egypt a differentiated class-structure of the provincial population beginning with the Roman and Alexandrian citizens, stretching over the hellenized privileged groups of the indigenous society and ending up with the ordinary Egyptian peasant. The article deals with the mechanisms of controlling the access to the privileged status groups of the domestic Egyptian population during the period of the Roman principate (1st to 3rd century CE); in particular concerning the residents of the local district capitals (metropolitai) and the members of the gymnasial class (apo gymnasiou). The specific focus is notably on the administrative process of granting admission to these status groups (the so called epikrisis) and the use which was made of certain archival documents (like census- and epikrisis records, population registers or tax lists) which were suitable to prove the status claimed by the persons applying for admission of their male offspring to one or both of these status groups.

The ancient administrative archives and dossiers were commonly collected and kept by officials and often thrown away after some time. The finding of such groups of documents from the recovery of mummy cartonnages has opened a new problem, that of the definition of the single texts as original, copies or drafts, and that of the authorship and ownership of these dossiers. Many texts in fact seem to be drafts, because of their layout or writing, but a more attentive study of the features of some of these documents shows that some papyri are actually copies written by scribes. Some examples are taken from famous papyri collections like P. Tebtunis, P. Köln, P. Heidelberg.

There has not been much research on the archives of the governors in Late Antiquity. Apparently these archives are thought of as a typical element of a „bureaucratic“ state such as the Later Roman Empire, and it is assumed that they are well documented. But it is quite the opposite: there are almost no general references to archives of the governors. As in the case of the archives of the governors of the High Empire – whose existence has been doubted -, the existence of such archives in Late Antiquity can be proven only in an indirect way. This is achieved by collecting evidence for the principal elements of such archives and their preservation and for the members of staff who cared for them. This article puts together the evidence for diaries of daily activities of the governors, the collection of letters written by them and to them, the petitions submitted to them and the documents of their financial administration, with the aim to prove the existence of such archives.

Throughout the history oft he classical and hellenistic Greek polis archives have played an important role in the administration of a city-state. From the 2nd cent. BC on a reorganization both of the structure of the archives as well as the publication of documents registered in archives can be shown. The first part of this paper concerns two fragmented inscriptions from Kos (IG XII 4, 1, 84 and 85) which contain information of a restructuring of the city-archive. Parts II and III concern the manumission inscriptions from Delphi and the grave-inscriptions from imperial Asia Minor. The focus is on the original text handed in at the archive and the question whether the inscriptions give any information on the structure and wording of these deeds.

The distinction between legal and administrative documents or letters, that have been used since the beginning of assyriological studies, may help understand archival documents taken separately. However, analysing archives as a whole by (re)constructing files and dossiers is the only way to make sense with documents of different natures, as they were sorted, filed, and kept by those who produced them. After a general presentation of the Old Babylonian archival documentation, this paper investigates the function and motivation of family archives and archival documents, introducing another typological distinction : among the large mass of sealed documents, which record the responsibility of persons regarding authority, whether legal or administrative, we should distinguish between documents of limited validity, recording temporary arrangements between persons, and documents of unlimited validity establishing permanent status of persons and properties, which compose the core of Old Babylonian family archives. A third class of archival texts, without any sealings, served other purposes in the archives, recording the memory of domestic bookkeeping or of archival activities as such.

Dans un article paru en 1987, "Cities of reason", Oswyn Murray s'est interrogé sur le degré de rationalité de la polis grecque. Sa conclusion est sans appel. "La cité grecque est une cité de raison parce que l'homme grec est un animal politique, et cela dès Homère ; nous pouvons retracer l'évolution, mais elle représente non pas un changement de nature, d'un type d'organisation social à un autre, mais l'évolution rationnelle d'un système dont le caractère fondamental n'a pas changé". Toutefois, il considérait que vers 400, à Athènes, la démocratie coutumière s'effaçait au profit d'une démocratie constitutionnelle, sur fond de transition d'une culture orale à une culture écrite, sans développer cette association entre les modes de communication et les institutions politiques. Il constatait donc une évolution. Sans mésestimer le débat général opposant les tenants de Max Weber – les cités grecques ont inventé le politique, au sens où elles l'ont distingué, rendu autonome par rapport aux autres sphères d'activité – à ceux d'Émile Durkheim – ce n'est pas le politique mais le religieux qui domine les sociétés grecques –, les historiens semblent avoir négligé l'importance des manières d'archivage dans le degré de rationalité de l'organisation civique. Le cas athénien offre pourtant des informations nombreuses à ce sujet. La prise en compte de la dimension spatiale du politique à travers les différentes associations pour reprendre l'expression de N.F. Jones semble indiquer que le fonctionnement rationnel des institutions civiques à l'époque classique repose sur les archives, centrales et périphériques.

In the Hellenistic period the archival behaviour of the Greek poleis experienced an important increase and development, out of need for negotiating relationships with the kings and keeping the related documents. This essay focuses on the diverse categories of records generated by the royal administration and on their locations in the city archives, along with the related internal files and throughout the resultant chains of documents. Royal letters and ordonnances are investigated along with the city records of royal taxation or fiscal exemption, the documentary consequences of ruler cult and euergetic subscriptions of kings and queens, the calendar correspondence and relationship with the royal bookkeeping. A final topic is the common need for the historical players to preserve the documents of a long-standing administrative relationship in the concerned area, as a legitimate precedent for the future rulers.

This contribution deals with the archives of Old Assyrian traders (originating from the city-state of Assur on the Tigris) from the first centuries of the second millennium BC, found in their houses in the lower town of the ancient Anatolian city of Kanesh, which is excavated since 1948 by Turkish archaeologists. The now more than 23.000 cuneiform tablets discovered there, belonging to at least 60 different merchants’ archives, constitute the most detailed and extensive written evidence on overland trade before the early Middle Ages. After providing general information on the traders, their business and their archives (kept in sealed “strong-rooms”), a more detailed analysis is preceded (§ 2) by distinguishing the various situations in which traders lived and worked in Kanesh – seniors or young men, with or without their family, some also with a house in another trading town in Anatolia - and the impact this had on their relations with their mother-city and on the nature and number of written records in their archives. In § 3 a brief sketch is given of the self-governing, corporate Assyrian merchant community, called “kārum Kanesh” (its location and archives have not yet been discovered), run by its main members. As an extension of the government of the city of Assur and head of the colonial network in Anatolia it played a vital role in performing administrative (it kept accounts, organized general accounting sessions and could impose rules), commercial (organizing collective operations and dealing with the local palace and ruler) and judicial tasks (as court of law), whose impact on the activities of the traders is reflected by their archives. In § 4 the three main categories into which the records may be distinguished are described: a large variety of letters, legal documents (contracts and judicial records) and memorandums, lists and short notes, whose functions the long § 5 analyzes. Three functions, which may overlap, are distinguished. Firstly (§ 5.1) as means of communication, mainly by letters, essential for the success of the caravan system and the contacts between people - relatives, business partners, authorities - in Assur and the colonies, notably with personnel and relatives traveling or temporarily settled elsewhere in Anatolia. Secondly (§ 5.2) as aid to memory, letters, testimonies, memorandums and lists, to keep track of the many, often complex and valuable transactions, especially investments and credit operations, to monitor due dates and dun defaulting debtors. And thirdly (§ 5.3) as evidence, especially “valid” records, that is those in sealed envelopes, both contracts and agreements and a variety of usually sworn depositions and testimonies, which resulted from and were used in private summonses, mediation, arbitration or formal lawsuits. The latter could take place in kārum Kanesh and in Assur, before the City Assembly, headed by the ruler of Assur, which resulted in verdicts and official letters. Credit operations in particular generated many evidentiary records, most of them in order to provide creditors with various securities and specific facilities, such as a “payment contract” (with a defaulting debtor) and a kind of “bearer’s cheques”. Paragraph 6 investigates the role of “copies” and “duplicates”, both of letters and “valid records”, made to serve multiple addressees of letters, to provide business partners and co-witnesses with essential data (e.g. to dun defaulting debtors and to prepare for lawsuits), and to keep evidence available when originals were sent overland. The final § 7 analyzes the various ways in which records were classified, by subject matter, persons involved, the nature of the texts (e.g. letters, debt-notes, and sealed or unsealed records), and stored in the archives. This was usually on shelves along the walls or in various types of frequently sealed containers (wooden boxes, baskets, leather bags and jars) or as sealed packets, whose contents could be identified by inscribed bullae that served as labels. Letters of absent traders who ask wives or friends to retrieve records from their archives and write about the transport of groups of tablets provide interesting information. Unfortunately the archaeological record about the discovery of the tablets usually is too general, because their exact find-spots and numbers are rarely mentioned, which makes it impossible to distinguish valid, current records, from old files, no longer in use and possibly stored in jars. The informative value of the bullae, often separated from the tablets to which they belonged and published separately, is also not exploited. The resulting picture, mainly based on the textual information, shows a rather practical way of classification in various types of easily distinguishable groups and files in different “containers”, but many details remain unclear.

This paper deals with the archives of the Middle Babylonian Period (1500-1000 BC) giving first an overview of the material, showing the limits of the existing and so far published texts and then trying to reconstruct lost archives with special help of material from outside the archives: the kudurru inscriptions on stone. The focus of the article is on real estate documents inside and outside the archives and the aim is to investigate whether there were restrictions on the sale of real estate property and whether the legal information found on the kudurru inscriptions can be used to reconstruct documents that must have existed in the archives.

This essay examines the contents of the plaint (engklema) and its role in Athenian law and legal procedure. The plaint contained the full names of the accuser and the defendant with patronymic and demotic and the name of the action the accuser was bringing against the defendant and the names of those who witnessed the summons. The plaint also contained a brief summary of the accuser’s main charges all expressed in the language of the relevant statute. The plaint therefore determined the main issues about which the judges would decide and defined what was relevant and irrelevant (exo tou pragmatos). It ensured that the judges would concentrate on the question, did the defendant violate the law? and that they would pay no attention to irrelevant issues like public service. After the trial, the plaint was kept on file in the office of the relevant magistrate and could be produced as evidence in subsequent litigation. In this way it helped to uphold the important principle of res iudicata.