The Demography of Roman Egypt.

• Author: Wilfong, Terry G.

Although historians of the ancient Near East have shown increasing interest in applying the methods of social science to their data, this has proven difficult in such disciplines as demography because of the generally incomplete nature of the evidence. Roman Egypt supplies an exceptional survival of demographically significant sources: papyri which record data reported for the Roman census. The majority of these census returns date from the second and early third century C.E., and it is for this period specifically that they provide a rich source for the demography of Roman Egypt. Scholars have, in the past, attempted to generalize from individual examples in these documents, but the present volume is the first to collect all the data and, by applying the methodology and models of modern demographic studies, attempt to derive a comprehensive profile of the population of Roman Egypt and to further determine what this tells us about the society. The result is a dense, thought-provoking, and masterful study of an ancient population, required reading for anyone seriously interested in Roman Egypt and a useful example for research on other ancient cultures.

The raw data for the study are presented in the second half of the book: a catalogue of the census declarations from Roman Egypt. Here, in summary form, is a household-by-household survey of all known census declarations. Data from over three hundred households are presented in chronological order, including the names and ages of household members, family stemmata where possible, and detailed comments and references. This catalogue is an extremely useful resource, both in the context of the book as a whole and as an independent reference in itself, collecting together information from hundreds of papyri scattered all over the world, with extensive notes and summaries of Roger Baghall's own long series of articles on the census returns. The catalogue also includes appendices of corrections to published editions of census returns and a concordance of published texts to households. Of necessity, the information in this catalogue is presented in a terse and abbreviated style; this may make the catalogue somewhat difficult for the non-papyrologist to use.

The first part of the book is devoted to the interpretation of the data in the census returns. The authors begin by supplying a context for the returns and go on to discuss the problems and advantages of using this corpus as demographic evidence...