Displaced, hence, not lost: the afterlife of private archives from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt

Abstract

This contribution focuses on case studies of private archives from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, as they are the best cases directly attested in the surviving evidence of archives for the period. After a contextualisation of archives in the Greek and Roman worlds, this chapter shows how case studies from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt help us to better understand the characteristics, strategies, impacts, roles, and implications of private archiving practices in their socio-cultural milieu. In particular, private archives from Egypt are mobilised to reconstruct issues of the conservation, protection, and particularly removal and reuse of archives. It is argued that this evidence offers material that challenges the traditional assumptions that equate archival displacement to simple loss or destruction. The survival of these private archives from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt was directly dependent on their having being displaced, thus, they shift displacement’s heuristic value from loss to survival, giving focus on the archives’ afterlife. This adds an important methodological layer to the question of archival displacement.