Petrie Papyri. Volume 1: The Wills

This is the first volume of the long awaited new edition of the Petrie papyri, which were found in mummy cartonnage in a cemetery on the fringe of the Fayum and first published in the last decade of the 19th century. Hundreds of Greek and demotic papyri will be reedited with many additions to the editio princeps (which did not include the numerous fragments) and an up-to-date commentary. The present volume contains the remains of a register of Ptolemaic wills, dated between 238 and 226 B.C., and now housed in London, Dublin, Oxford and Jena. The more than fifty wills, some of them very fragmentary, are a prime source of information for Greek law of inheritance (with striking parallels in the wills of Plato and Aristotle), for the organisation of the Ptolemaic army (most wills are drawn up for soldiers in order to safeguard their military possessions), for women's rights (apparently the wife did not enjoy legal protection and had to be provided for by means of a will), for personal descriptions in official documents, for slavery and for the presence of Greeks and Alexandrians in the Egyptian interior in the third century B.C.