After three short years, Ellis Cuffe reports that he has finally digitised the Karanis Tax Rolls papyrological archive, alongside Profs. Alan Bowman and Andrew Wilson from the Oxford Roman Economy Project.
Since it is one of the longest surviving documents from antiquity – longer even than the Odyssey! – the project has been a gargantuan undertaking: 1,000 taxpayers, 17,000 recorded transactions, and 400,000 individual cells of data.
A quote from Ellis: “it is done and I still have hairs left on my head. Unfortunately, there are far fewer and what is left is turning a whiter shade of grey. The database is completely unique because nobody else has been mad enough to attempt it.”
“Why digitise the archive?”, you might say…
The Karanis Tax Rolls attest to a small rural town in the Fayyum region in Roman Egypt in the AD 170s. What’s absolutely mind-melting is that the archive gives the names of almost every single adult male who called Karanis home. It’s an incomparable snapshot of the ancient world. It lets us look into family structure, who lived with/near who…could they afford to pay their taxes – if not, why not? But what’s truly amazing about it, is that we can find many of these men attested elsewhere. Take Ninnaros (who also liked to be called Ptolemaios) – we see him paying taxes in his teens in the Tax Rolls, but also see him attested as a 2 year old living with his parents and grandparents (P.Lond. II 182b, line 11), who were both married to their siblings…yes, you read that right…and we can see him in the AD 180s as an estate manager for a female landowner, Longinia Sempronia (BGU I 39, line 2). We can track this single random individual living in the bottom-end of nowhere across an almost twenty year period. He lived a fascinating life, survived civil strife and the Antonine Plague, and lived to tell the tale to us.
And so, I hope, you can see now why it was all worth it…
