190
ROBERT P. STEPHAN and ARTHUR VERHOOGT
not addressed to Tiberianus, a fragment of court proceedings and a petition. The newly associated texts shed further light on the archive of Tiberianus and prompt a restudy of the group of texts as a whole.
The archive of Tiberianus is one of the most important sources
for the life of active soldiers and veterans of the Roman army in
Egypt.2 The archive consists of letters to Claudius Tiberianus, both
during his period of active service and after his retirement from the
Roman army. The senders of the letters vary, although most were
written by Claudius Terentianus, who identifies himself as the son
of Tiberianus.
In this paper, we will sketch the circumstances that led to the
discovery of the papyri belonging to Tiberianus' archive at the site
of Karanis and re-associate the documentary texts with their archaeological context. As was the case with many of the papyri unearthed from the Egyptian town of Karanis, the data related to the
discovery of the documents, which was recorded in the Karanis
Record of Objects, was not published in P.Mich. VIII (1951). Only a
brief account appears in the introduction. This information succinctly appears in the introduction: "(the papyri) were discovered
under a stairway in a house on the second level from the top of the
mound."3 No further attempt was made to relate the papyri to the
house where they were found or to the associated artifacts. The reconsideration of these papyri within their archaeological context reveals that their findspot offers a broader framework for interpretation, one that takes into account not only the nature of their contents, but also the relationship of the documents to other artifacts.
The recontextualization of papyri from Karanis has its problems, as it is often difficult to reconstruct relationships between artifacts from the same findspot.4 In this approach, the archaeological
2 E.g. R.A. Alston, Soldier and Society in Roman Egypt: A Social History
(London and New York 1985).
3 P.Mich. VIII (1951) 16.
4 For previous exercises in re-contextualization, see P. Van Minnen, "Houseto-House Enquiries: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Roman Karanis," ZPE 100
(1994) 227-51.
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