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Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 48 (2011) 99-112
The Dossier of Flavia Anastasia,
Part One: Document Prescripts
T.M. Hickey and Brendan J. Haug University of California, Berkeley
Abstract
Six document prescripts are the first installment in the serial publica tion of the dossier of Flavia Anastasia, an Oxyrhynchite landholder
attested in the last quarter of the sixth century.
What follows is the first installment in the serial publication of the dossier of Flavia Anastasia, an Oxyrhynchite landholder whosefloruit was the last
quarter of the sixth century. This edition of the Anastasia papyri is organized
by document type. Six prescripts are presented here; future parts will concern
sureties, receipts for irrigation machinery, other receipts, leases and loans, accounts, and varia. The series will conclude with a synthetic essay - exploring,
inter alia, the contribution of this middling landholder's dossier to the Apiondominated historiography of the late antique Oxyrhynchite - as well as indices
and a master list of addenda and corrigenda.1
The Anastasia dossier has been known since the early part of the twentieth century (1910), but its publication has been plagued by delays. Certainly
the fragmentary nature of the material itself has contributed to these, and
one objective of this serial publication is to "flush out" any unknown parts of
the dossier. Its recognized components are scattered between Giessen (which
holds the bulk of the identified unpublished material), Erlangen, Oxford, New
York (Columbia University), and Ann Arbor (University of Michigan); a piece
in Leuven was destroyed in the Second World War (May 1940). The follow
1 To the memory of l'abbe Joseph van Haelst.
Hickeythanks Prof. Dr. Manfred Landfester for his permission to publish the Giessen
portion of the dossier and for the warm hospitality (and outstanding working conditions) that he enjoyed when he studied the originals in 1998 and 2006. Both authors
are grateful to this journal's referees and editors for their comments on the manuscript.
The photographs appear courtesy of the Universitatsbibliothek Giessen. The image
of P.bibl.univ.Giss. inv. 55 is a composite of high-resolution "tiles" made by Hickey in
2006, which was then enhanced for legibility in Adobe Photoshop CS4.
