Law of Greco-Roman Egypt in Light of Papyri, 332 B.C.-640 A.D.

The importance of Egypt in the history of the Roman Empire can hardly be exaggerated. Today it is recognized that much of the autocratic machinery of the later emperors was designed in the workshop of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies. But to us Egypt is even more important because the recovery of the papyri enables us to study in the sharpest outline details of private and social life to an extent unparalleled elsewhere. Much that has been written on the life of the later empire necessarily consists of cautious generalization from the particular experience of Egypt.

The present volume is a monument, not only to the distinguished Polish scholar who has written it, but also to the reality of international collaboration in the world of scholarship, and to the integrity of purpose which, at the outset of the war, brought this sixty-year-old professor from Cracow to Aix-en-Provence and subsequently, in 1940, to Columbia University, in order that he might crown a life’s work with this study of the law of Greco-Roman Egypt from the time of Alexander to a.d. 640. Taubenschlag’s book is a thoroughly documented work of detailed research. It starts out with an introductory survey of the interaction of the three legal traditions, native, Greek, and Roman, the forging of a minor ius gentium in the furnace of practical experience and then proceeds to a full account of the private law of Egypt, as it concerned natural and legal persons, domestic relations, and the law of property. Two further chapters cover penal law and the procedure of the courts; and the book ends with a table of sources, an index, and an interesting list of sixty-one previous contributions by the author to legal studies, ancient, medieval, and modem.