Using the Syriac Documentary Parchments, Today and in Antiquity

* This article uses the bibliographic abbreviation DARI for the series of articles with titles beginning “Documents d’archives romains inédits du Moyen Euphrate . . . ,” including DARI 1 (Feissel and Gascou [1989]), DARI 2 (Feissel and Gascou [1995]), DARI 3 (Feissel, Gascou, and Teixidor [1997]), and DARI 4 (Feissel and Gascou [2000]). 1 There are no extant Syriac documentary texts written on papyri, although there are a few Syriac letters written on papyri and other fragmentary papyri with Syriac writing on them. An example that has recently come to light is P.Mich. inv. 7198; see McLaughlin and Berkes, “Syriac Letter Reused” (2018). In addition to the three extant Syriac documentary parchments listed above, there are at least eight other documents that contain some Syriac writing. For a discussion of these, see most recently Fournet, Rise of Coptic (2020), 28–32. For the sake of brevity, in this article I will refer to P.Dura 28, P.Euphrates 18, and P.Euphrates 19 collectively as the “Syriac documentary parchments,” even though the language used to draft these documents diverges from Classical Syriac in certain aspects of its morphology. Nevertheless, in previous scholarship they have been identified as Syriac documents, and so it would be overly pedantic to call them otherwise. All three, moreover, were drafted in a dialect of Middle Aramaic that closely resembles Classical Syriac and the differences in morphology and syntax are slight, so I believe that this nomenclature is appropriate for the present study. For a discussion of the language of the documents, see Drijvers are P.Euphrates 18 (240 ce), P.Euphrates 19 (242 ce), and P.Dura 28 (243 ce). Their discovery in 1933 (P.Dura 28) and 1988 (P.Euphrates 18 and 19) ushered in two distinct waves of scholarship.2 The first wave followed the publication of P.Dura 28 by Charles C. Torrey in 1935.3 In the same year, Alfred R. Bellinger and Bradford C. Welles published a legal and historical commentary on the document, in which they concluded that the document was of a “mixed character,” combining local, Mesopotamian, and Roman elements, including a possible reference to a