The taxonomy of the legal document: an account of the language and terminology of clauses in Greek legal documents from Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine Egypt

This book presents the results of a long-term investigation into the structure of Greek legal documents preserved on papyrus. It provides a clause-by-clause analysis of 281 formulations used in contracts, mostly from Egypt, spanning the early Hellenistic to the late Byzantine period. Designed as both a typology and a research tool, the study is based on the Synallagma database—a digital corpus first created with the support of the Israel Science Foundation and now hosted at the University of Münster. The approach is philological, quantitative, and comparative: each clause is examined for its syntactic form, legal function, and diachronic trajectory. The goal is to uncover the linguistic mechanisms by which scribes encoded rights, duties, and transfers of ownership. As a contribution to legal history and historical linguistics, the book offers an empirical foundation for the study of formulaic writing in antiquity—well beyond the specific body of sources it analyzes.