On a late summer day in the year 362 of our era, in a village in one of the remotest comers of the Roman Empire, three Egyptians executed a contract for the sale of a slave girl.[ The agreement was drawn up in the village of Kellis, today Ismant el-Kharab, in the Dakleh Oasis -then called the Mothite Nome after its capital, Mothis -of the western desert of Upper Egypt.This village lay more than 300 km from the nearest parts of the Nile Valley, itself already a distant and exotic locality to Roman tastes.? The contract is, in terms of law and form, nothing remarkable, although it is the latest such sale of a slave from Egypt to include a price.The participants -a married couple as sellers, a village carpenter as purchaser -look equally unremarkable.But in this transaction is encapsulated, I believe, an entire pattern of behavior that seems likely to have been typical for Egypt as a whole and probably much of the Roman Empire.Most of the elements of this pattern have been noted by students of ancient history, but the way in which they fit together into a pattern has generally been either ignored or denied.Neither this single contract nor the other evidence I shall cite can fairly be said to prove the reality of the pattern beyond all doubt, but I hope to offer persuasive arguments for its reality.First, let us examine the details of this sale.The sellers were Psais son of Pekysis and his wife Tatoup, officially from Kellis but, they say, actually living in an epoikion, hamlet, the name of which is damaged beyond readability.The purchaser, Tithoes son of Petesis, is a resident of Kellis.Their names are all Egyptian, Psais coming from the god of fortune Shai"and Tithoes from the local god Tutu.3 Tithoes, a carpenter, lived in part of a large and elaborate house in 2 P.Kellis I 8, August-September, 362.I am indebted to Klaas Warp and John Whitehome for knowledge of this text in advance of its publication.This article draws heavily on the work by Bruce Frier and me cited in note 5, and I must acknowlege particularly my debt to my co-author's demographic expertise.Equally, however, he is not to be held responsible for the speculations in this article which go beyond the account given in our book.For the excavations at Kellis, in my view the most interesting and important excavation of a site from Roman Egypt since the Michigan work at Karanis, see the introduction to P.Kellis I and the excavation reports cited there.Tatoup is in form also a theophoric name, but J do not know its derivation.
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