This volume contains 18 mostly short papers from a 2016 conference. Eight relate to the host project to study the state processing and management of population and land data in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt; the other ten are miscellaneous contributions about records in the ancient Near East and wider Greek and Roman worlds. There is no introduction to draw out common interests or themes. Three of the ten general contributions discuss new texts: Manuel Molina argues that foremen at Ur (c. 2000 BC) fiddled their labour records; a fourth-century BC ostrakon from Athens, according to David Lewis, records contributions from members of an association; Ornella Salati discusses a military account from Egypt (second century AD) which refers to the property of two Roman soldiers who have died by suicide. Daniel Fleming suggests that written records were an adjunct to temple management at Emar (c. 1200 BC); Melanie Groß surveys the types of lists surviving from neo-Assyrian palaces (eighth–seventh century BC); Julia Lougovaya reviews the role of tamiai (‘attendants’) in Homeric epic. Miklós Könczöl shows that Cicero’s references to Verres’ accounts as governor of Sicily are more rhetoric than documentation, while Éva Jakab discusses Cicero’s attempt to paper over embezzlement by his staff when governor of Cilicia. The most substantive contribution is Cristina Carusi’s study of the building accounts from Classical Athens, along with Véronique Chankowski’s summary of the Delian accounts. They agree that ‘sacred’ and civic finances cannot be separated, and that their stone ‘accounts’ had been extracted from various records on wood or papyrus. Chankowski questions whether these costly inscriptions were symbolic rather than practical, but Carusi argues strongly that the changes of form and content in the Attic texts, adding detail but losing clarity, and the fourth-century switch to inscribed specifications, imply that public celebration of the state’s financial support for temples was the primary motive for their inscription.

Of the eight studies from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, two are terminological: Willy Clarysse reports on his database distinction between ‘accounts’ and ‘lists’, more optimistic than practical, and the Greek words besides logos used of ‘accounts’; Patrick Sänger wonders why the registry office at Tebtunis sometimes called rules of associations cheirographiai (‘documents’) rather than nomoi. Sandra Lippert and Maren Schentuleit review the numerous and mostly unpublished Roman-period temple accounts in Demotic from Soknopaiou Nesos. An unexpected practice which they signpost is the costing of disbursements of foodstuffs in cash ‘at the estimated street price’, perhaps to facilitate preparation of the annual monetary account of income and expenditure required by the Roman administration. There is hidden treasure here for economic and accounting history. Andrea Jördens compares accounting in the Heroninos archive with Zenon’s accounts and some others to illustrate how problems of survival and context impede conclusions about management.

The other four papers deal with state processing of data. Katelijn Vandorpe and Nick Vaneerdewegh try to explain the flow of data from second-century BC Arsinoite village surveys of land and crops to nome level, but the detail in their tables is overwhelming, and although the one nome-level account, from Edfu, shows some elimination of specifics, it seems that the full surveys were also copied to nome level. Nicola Reggiani provides an exhaustive survey of the types of identifier used by individuals in making declarations of people or property to the Roman administration, and notes which were retained in higher-level summary lists; more interesting would be which identifiers, and how, were used to create summary lists from the declarations. Thomas Kruse and Uri Yiftach discuss monthly reports by the collectors of cash taxes which list payments by individual taxpayers at second-century Theadelphia and Karanis, respectively. Kruse probes how these relate to the ‘target’ registers of taxpayers with their tax dues and the collectors’ working accounts. While at Theadelphia the registers of taxpayers, to whose columns the monthly reports refer, were clearly arranged in first-letter alphabetical order, at Karanis they were not; Yiftach proposes that the order used at Karanis was topographical, but more likely is a grouping by the mysterious 94 ‘klerouchies’ used there for taxation of land. Taken together, there is some useful spadework in these four studies, but little advance in general understanding. They do, however, challenge the research assumption of a selective flow of data from village to nome ‘level’: the Roman-period officials and tax collectors who created the village records, secondary as well as primary, were metropolites operating from the nome capital; maybe there was a single nome-wide process, which also produced the nome summaries sent to Alexandria, again accompanied by full copies of the basic accounts. To understand management, we should perhaps work top-down, for example asking what fiscal decisions a Prefect might make at a nome dialogismos (‘reckoning’) and on the basis of what evidence.