A Business letter from Egyptian Museum

Abstract

The current paper tackles an edition of unpublished Greek documentary papyrus from the Cairo Egyptian Museum under glass 86 of the S (pecial) R (egister) Nr. 3049 with inv. 161. This papyrus is from Tampemou (Oxyrhynchite nome) and dates back to the Third Century AD. This papyrus text is a business letter. The letter preserved some details about the transport of sheep made by the official who travelled south to Tampemou in the eastern toparchy of the Oxyrhynchite Nome. The verso contains two lists of the landowners and the amounts of wheat recorded after their names. The purpose of amounts of wheat on the verso did not serve for taxation, because there is nothing to indicate the taxation. The names of the people appearing in the two lists were probably tenants, and the amounts of wheat recorded after their names may be the rentals which they paid for their leaseholds, though the rates of rent in private tenancy were usually higher. Thus it is possible that they were sharecroppers. Sharecropping is a type of farming in which the sharecropper rents small plots of land from a landowner in return for a portion of his crop, to be given to the landowner at the harvest. The sharecropper agreed to hand over a proportion between one-third and two-thirds of the crop to the landowner, instead of paying a rent. The landowner provided the sharecropper with land, seeds, and tools; these supplies were deducted from the portion of the sharecropper. The papyrus has been presented as follows: a general description of the contents of the papyrus, dimensions of the papyrus in centimeters, number of lines of text, arrows indicate the direction of writing relative to that of papyrus surface, a transcription of the Greek text, English translation and extensive commentary.