Roman documentary and epigraphic culture

Rome may be the best-documented ancient state whose actual paperwork is almost entirely gone. Its officials produced census counts, army muster rolls, minutes of senate business, and contracts scratched onto wax tablets on a scale unmatched by any other ancient government, and virtually none of it has come down to us from the Italian peninsula itself. Stone took over where paper failed: hundreds of thousands of carved inscriptions now stand in for that lost bureaucratic mass, alongside a handful of lucky accidents, such as the charred library buried at Herculaneum's Villa of the Papyri and the day-to-day writing tablets recovered at Pompeii, both of which hint at how much ordinary correspondence and record-keeping once existed everywhere else and simply rotted away. Roman literature fared only slightly better: it survives today only because medieval copyists kept recopying a narrow shortlist of favoured authors, quietly letting whole genres and countless other names disappear -- precisely the kind of bottleneck the conjectures gathered here put to the test.

Ice-core money supply, Hoards as a fear index, and Gresham's phase transition all treat Roman coinage as a direct economic instrument -- ice-core lead pollution as a money-supply proxy, buried hoards as an index of fear, debasement as a measurable phase transition. Brick-stamp Gibrat and Millstone gravity both look at mass-produced physical objects, stamped bricks and millstones, for the statistical fingerprint of an industrial-scale production system. Graffiti thread depth reads casual wall graffiti at Pompeii as evidence of social and political depth, not mere curiosity, and Peutinger's seams finds a genealogical seam in how the Peutinger Map's geography was actually assembled from different sources.