Counting the People in Hellenistic Egypt: Volume 1, Population Registers (P. Count)

How in Egypt does a new dynasty deal with the problems of establishing rule in a country with a long history of developed administration? This is the central question informing the historical studies of Volume II based on early Hellenistic taxation registers surviving on papyrus, which are published in Volume I. New light is shed on the taxation system, the occupational and demographic breakdown of the population, and relations between Greeks and Egyptians. Other topics discussed include their differing household patterns, stockholding, gender relations, and childrearing.

This volume publishes fifty-four Ptolemaic papyri from the Fayum and Middle Egypt, with English translations and extensive commentaries. The texts, dating from c. 250–150 BC and written in either Greek or Egyptian demotic, record lists of adults, ordered by village, occupation and social group, and by household, together with the taxes paid on their persons, their livestock and trades. Some are more than twenty columns long. All texts have been studied on the originals by an international team of scholars. Many are published here for the first time; the others have been extensively revised with numerous new joins between fragments. Lists of tax-payers and their payments provide a wealth of information on population and family structure, administrative practice, social and professional groups and naming practices. Providing the documentary basis for the historical studies of Volume II, P. Count is essential for any serious evaluation of that account.

List of plates; List of figures; Preface; List of abbreviations; List of conventions; Greek records including: salt-tax records, household records, tax-district records, tax-collectors records, list of occupations, list of ethnics and occupations, tax-exemptions records, taxpayers records, tax-registers; Bibliography; Indices.

This book consists of two closely related parts. Volume I publishes fifty-four Ptolemaic papyri from the Fayum and Middle Egypt, with English translations and extensive commentaries. Volume II uses these texts, created for purposes of taxation, to provide historical studies analysing fundamental aspects of Ptolemaic Egypt.