This volume of the Michigan papyri publishes 27 Greek papyri that date to a twenty-year period a.d. 354–374, and concern the transport of grain from Oxyrhynchus to Alexandria and Pelusium. Each text is presented with an introduction, the Greek text, and a clear and erudite commentary. Six of the papyri are partially revised readings of texts published elsewhere ( P. Mich. XX 800, 805–6, 812, 815–16). English translations are provided for all except the most fragmentary (818) or for simple lists that are usually particularly damaged (e.g. 821–7). Images of all but one of the papyri here (namely 800 = P. Laur. IV 162) are available either at the host institutions, through APIS, or through the relevant links on the Papyri.info website; links to images are provided in the introduction to each document.
Aside from the texts, the volume also contains a concise introduction divided into seven sections (complete with extensive footnotes and bibliography in spite of its succinct nature). The first section provides a general background concerning the transportation of wheat and this archive's place within that system (pp. 15–23), and a particularly useful discussion of the formulaic nature of the contracts in the archive (pp. 19–22). The second section briefly discusses the civic officials that commonly appear in these papyri, namely the bouleutai of Oxyrhynchus and politeuomenoi (pp. 23–7), the latter appearing chiefly as ship owners. The third deals with the epimeletai, those officials responsible for the collection and transport of particular commodities, here wheat and barley (pp. 28–31). The fourth section (pp. 32–3) considers the polykopitai, sailors on small Nile ships ‘with at least two sets of oars’ (p. 32), and the kybernetai, boatmen on ships ‘with a number of oars’ (p. 32). The fifth section provides a brief discussion of the imperial oath formulas used in the texts (pp. 34–5), and the sixth (pp. 35–6) considers topographical indications and provides a list of the villages that appear in the archive. The seventh and final section provides a very brief discussion concerning the chronological elements and consular formulas in the texts (pp. 36–7).
There are two appendices. The first reproduces seven documents from the Oxyrhynchite nome (P. Oxy. LXVII 4606, 4608–13) that date to a.d. 361–364. Although the texts here are provided, as is much of the corrigenda, as one might expect, neither the discussion nor the translations are given, accessible as they are in P. Oxy. LXVII. The reason for the inclusion of these documents is simple: like the Michigan texts published here, they all relate to the transportation of annona wheat and barley and their delivery to Pelusium and Alexandria.
The second appendix contains another seven Oxyrhynchite documents (from several different collections) that date to the late-fourth and early-fifth centuries a.d., slightly later than this archive, and that all concern transportation by ship. Notable is a re-edition, based on the readings from no fewer than ten of these newly published Michigan texts (800, 804, 806, 808–11, 813–15), of a fifth-century a.d. text, P. Wisc. II 65 (pp. 185–8). This text is noteworthy because of the inclusion of a clause concerning fraud (lines 8–9) that is absent from the Michigan texts. The editors suggest that this can be explained as a later development given the document's date (p. 187; although cf. perhaps P. Laur. I 6.8–9 and n. [a.d. 98–103] for an earlier parallel to the nautike kakourgia).
The volume concludes with ten indexes. These range from the names of the consulates and post-consulates that appear in the Michigan texts, through to personal names, before ending with a general index of words used in the archive.
This contribution is a particularly welcome addition to the existing corpora. The study of transportation and its relationship to the economy generally, particularly in Egypt through the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, has benefited from several excellent studies in the last decade or so, but although the ways in which different forms of transport were integrated into the larger Roman administrative and economic systems have been considered, the specific issue of transportation of various commodities by the system of canals and the Nile has rarely been examined in any significant detail (see p. 16 n. 4 for surveys of the collection and transport of tax grain in Egypt). Therefore, the publication of this archive is particularly timely. For those interested in transportation and the ancient economy, there is much to glean from the material presented here.
As noted by the editors (pp. 16–17), in the fourth century a.d. the process of transporting tax grain was effectively completed in two stages: the first involved moving the grain from the fields to the threshing floor, and then from there to storage granaries near navigable waterways; the second involved moving the grain from these facilities to Alexandria and Pelusium. Most of the texts presented refer to the second stage of the process (i.e. the transport to Egypt's two major Mediterranean ports), but 803, 807 and 819 do appear to refer to the first stage; in these cases, it seems that the transporters themselves were responsible for the cleaning of the wheat, the krithologia (see P. Mayerson, BASP 41 [2004], 127–37 [133–5 on 803, 807 and 819]). In fact 803 is a remarkable document as its state of preservation allows us to see a transporter, in this case Aurelius Olympios, undertake the two stages of the transportation of tax grain: he not only transported 632 artabas of wheat to Alexandria, but also cleaned it.
Those documents concerned with the second stage are, as one might expect, similar in the sense that they all conclude with a rather standard contract that contains several elements: the date, addressees, the author (the named transporter) and the surety, and a declaration by both the author and the surety that their respective obligations have been fulfilled. Subscriptions by the surety, and transporter, and finally that of a public notary follow (pp. 20–1). Nevertheless, the formulaic nature of their structure should not suggest that the process was altogether simple; things could certainly go wrong. This is most palpably demonstrated by 804, in which Aurelius Silvanus declares that he will transport 573 artabas of wheat to Alexandria; Silvanus, however, appears to have originally been a surety for a certain Horos, who was supposed to deliver 873 artabas. Horos delivered only 300 and Silvanus was effectively on the hook for providing the remaining 573 artabas, a shipment which, in turn, required its own surety, this time in the person of Aurelius Achilleus.
There are a few minor errors of content and formatting (for instance, one note in the errata on P. Oxy. LXVII 4612 [pp. 169–71], line 12 ἀννουμένου, κυρίου should read line 13; the font change in n. 6 p. 18), but the text appears to be largely clean. There is certainly nothing that detracts from the high level of scholarship one has come to expect from those involved in the production of this particular volume of the Michigan papyri. Given the difficulties faced in this volume's completion and subsequent publication, Worp deserves significant credit: the volume is not only a most welcome addition to the current scholarship, but it is also, at least in part, a fitting tribute to two exceedingly talented papyrologists.
