Vorlesungen über Juristische Papyruskunde

Lectures in Juristic Papyrology

The conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. had as a consequence a long-continued immigration into Egypt from every part of the world of the Greek city-states. Part of the population of Egypt had already, for centuries, been of foreign origin, but from Alexander onwards the fact of the two cultures, Egyptian and Greek, coexisting in the land of Egypt became much more significant, and determined the structures of public as well as private life. The distinction is nowhere more clearly apparent than in the two legal traditions, which persisted through Roman and Byzantine times right down to the Arab conquest; and the two traditions are massively exemplified in the, by now, enormous number of documentary papyri preserved by the dry climate of Egypt. Relevant documents survive in demotic Egyptian as well as Greek, but the former have, unfortunately, been little studied for legal history.

It is this law preserved in the papyri which is the subject of the discipline of »Juristic Papyrology«; it must be regarded as a fully constituent part of the history of ancient law, and has relevance to every branch of the law. Hans Julius Wolff was an outstanding practitioner of »Juristic Papyrology«, and in these »Lectures« he set out its most important elements in a general overview. The »Lectures« were given in the Freiburger rechtshistorisches Institut thirty years ago, but they remain the only modern general account of the law of the Greek papyri of Egypt that tackles not just the courts and procedure but also the institutions of the substantive private law. The modernity of Wolff's account is, first, that its approach is determinedly developmental; second, that it banishes the old »Romanist« style of interpreting the Greek papyri in the categories and concepts of Roman law and is based on the premise that Greek and Egyptian institutions must be seen as resting on their own legal notions and principles; and, thirdly, that it relates the papyri, at every point, to the political, social and economic circumstances of the age to which they belong.