of “The Law of the Egyptians,” for example.32) The charts below give a sense of the concentration of legal activity across time: the first is the total count of petitions from the first three and a half centuries of Roman rule in Egypt from the appendix of the recent monograph of Benjamin Kelly. The second counts the petitions in the first twenty volumes of the Sammelbuch griechischer Urkunden aus Aegypten. The Sammelbuch (SB) collects documents published internationally in unindexed journals; it is presented here in order to correct for editorial biases that might have gone into forming a particular collection represented in the aggregate count, or for “clumps” of relevant data that emerge from counting a particular archive (such as the large archive of petitions from firstcentury Euhemeria). The data have been “smoothed” in one important way: for petitions that are datable only on the basis of paleography, the “middle” date has been entered into the database (so for a papyrus of the third century, a date of 250 has been entered; for a papyrus of the second or third century, 200). The third chart is an aggregate count of published documents of all sorts that have been entered into the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der Griechischen Papyruskunden Ägyptens, a comprehensive database of papyrological sources.
Table 1. Petitions by Year—Sammelbuch
| Year | Number of petitions |
| 30 B.C.–1 B.C. | 5 |
| 1 A.D.–50 A.D. | 12 |
| 51 A.D.–100 A.D. | 12 |
| 101 A.D.–150 A.D. | 16 |
| 151 A.D.–200 A.D. | 27 |
| 201 A.D.–250 A.D. | 26 |
| 251 A.D.–300 A.D. | 3 |
Table 2. Petitions by Year—Kelly 2011
| Year | Number of petitions |
| 30 B.C.–1 B.C. | 20 |
| A.D.1–50 A.D. | 103 |
| 51 A.D.–100 A.D. | 45 |
| 101 A.D.–150 A.D. | 129 |
| 151 A.D.–200 A.D. | 143 |
| 201 A.D.–250 A.D. | 96 |
| 251 A.D.–300 A.D. | 31 |
Table 3. Documents by Year—HGV
| Year | Sum of quantity of documents |
| 50 B.C.–1 B.C. | 579 |
| 1 A.D.–50 A.D. | 1,334 |
| 51 A.D.–100 A.D. | 1,982 |
| 101 A.D.–150 A.D. | 5,099 |
| 151 A.D.–200 A.D. | 4,355 |
| 201 A.D.–250 A.D. | 2,326 |
| 251 A.D.–300 A.D. | 1,655 |
Charts like these, of course, are clumsy instruments. In many ways they compare apples to oranges: the HGV count includes not only papyri, but also ostraca. They cannot represent geographical distribution. The relative quantities of material in the three charts are radically different. They cannot account for generic variation in the aggregate data (the HGV count). They cannot account for subjective changes in the quality of the documentation—differences in the tone of a petition, for example. But in spite of these flaws they give some sense of how the quantity of petitions varies according to the quantity of our published material as a whole. The uptick in petitions in the second century would seem to have some significance in light of the shifts in the discourse about Egypt among elite Roman authors.
The stereotype of lawless, violent Egyptians, it appears, was being generated at roughly the same time (late first and early second centuries A.D.) as the inhabitants of Egypt began using the courts regularly, that is, when they began to integrate themselves into the Empire by refusing to settle their own problems privately. The claims of a violent Egypt are therefore more plausibly a reaction to the solidification and regularization of Roman rule over others and the responsibilities that this entails for a ruling power rather than a set of stable generative stereotypes. And as the Egyptians became more entangled in imperial systems of government, the stereotype was able to retain its currency. As I will argue in greater detail in the chapters that follow, the use of courts is somewhat analogous to the situation that Woolf describes for inscriptions: courts (and the judgments that they produce) were ways of bringing temporary stability to dynamic and complex interpersonal relationships. While the chronologies of these two different moves toward stability are slightly different (the process Woolf describes takes place over the course of the first century, whereas the evidence from the papyri begins to pick up in the late first and continues to rise in the second), they are nevertheless part of a single, dialectical process that emerges with the transition from the charismatic Julio-Claudian dynasty to the newer, stable, and increasingly bureaucratic world of the Flavians and Antonines. The stereotypes that emerge from writers like Tacitus grappling intellectually with the development of empire are as telling as the actions of Egyptian litigants.
* * *
While potentially useful for explaining the nature of imperial stereotypes, this sort of analysis has its limits. First and foremost, it leaves vague the precise definition of “Egyptian” and gives no clues as to what that designation might have meant to someone living in the Egyptian countryside (the chora, the main source of papyri). Second, while stereotypes are easy enough to identify, there is not necessarily a correlation between a particular stereotype and the institutional framework that an imperial power sets up “on the ground,” much less a direct correlation between an idealized institutional flow chart and the way that these institutional relations actually worked.
We can begin with the question of the relationship between “Egypt” and “Egyptians.” As mentioned above, four distinct “classes” of people inhabited Egypt: Alexandrian citizens, citizens of a few select Greek cities (Naukratis, Ptolemais, and eventually Antinoopolis), Jews, and everyone else (Egyptians), which would have included descendants of “Greek” colonists who did not have a privileged citizenship.
There is reason to think that this system of classes/citizenships was meaningful for the ways that people interacted with the imperial government, at least in some respects. Philo of Alexandria records, for example, that Egyptians were subject to harsher forms of corporal punishment than non-Egyptians, in this case, both Alexandrians and Jewish elders.33 One advocate in a case in the first century thinks that the Egyptians are in general supposed to be treated harshly by the law.34 Egyptians were famously singled out for harsh treatment by Caracalla, who expelled a number of them from Alexandria (the expulsion edict is ironically found on the very papyrus that documents the grant of citizenship in 212).35 These brief mentions aside, the main source of evidence concerning relations between groups is a papyrus relating to the office of the Idios Logos, the representative of the emperor’s accounts in Egypt. Since the province was treated, from conquest onward, more or less as the personal possession of the emperor, this official would have been his chief financial representative on the ground. The papyrus in question, the Gnomon or “guide,” lists