Egyptian papyrological and epigraphic worlds

Ask where the ancient Mediterranean's written record survived best, and the honest answer is: nowhere sensible. Egypt's rainless climate kept an enormous mass of routine writing intact -- receipts, personal letters, literary fragments, jotted onto papyrus or broken bits of pottery -- that would have rotted away almost anywhere else around the Mediterranean rim. Even so, survival within Egypt is badly lopsided: a handful of desert-margin sites, Oxyrhynchus chief among them, along with the Fayum villages, account for most of what turned up, while the marshy Delta, the old royal capitals, and Alexandria's own famed library district amount to a near-total blank. The conjectures gathered here put this lopsided but enormous archive to work testing monetary history, population change, and the pace of language shift, since three thousand years of pharaonic administration otherwise survive only as a thin band of inscriptions and temple records sitting atop a vast, missing paper trail.

The paper elasticity of prose and Nilometer to Geniza both use Egyptian material as an economic instrument, one reading paper costs directly, the other comparing Nile-flood records against prices recorded in the Cairo Geniza -- a synagogue storeroom whose discarded documents happened to survive -- centuries later. The Arabic rate constant and The Greek lapse rate each fit a rate of linguistic or administrative change -- how fast Arabic took over, how quickly Greek usage thinned out with distance from its centers -- against the dated documentary record. Becker in the Valley of the Kings applies a modern economic model of career choice to workers in the Valley of the Kings, using tomb-labour records as the test case.