Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27 (2019): 289-296

Book Review

This book makes use of the largest c o r p u s  o f  E g y p t i a n  d o c u m e n t s dating to the early Islamic period. 
Written in Coptic and Greek on ostraca 
(pottery or limestone) or papyrus, these 
documents originate from the Theban 
village of Djeme, which was built in 
and around the ruins of the temple of 
R a m e s e s  I I I  a t  M e d i n e t  A b u  “ w i t h  a 
population between fifteen hundred and 
two thousand” (p. 3). Dating from the late 
sixth to late eighth centuries CE, there 
are “1,877 texts from Djeme, out of a total 
of 3,559 texts from the wider Theban 
region... Almost 20 percent of published 
Coptic texts are from Djeme alone” (p. 2, 
n. 1). These texts have, however, attracted 
less interest from the wider research 
community concerned with the history 
of the early Islamic period than has the 

1.  Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 2005). 

2.  Most notably, Terry G. Wilfong, Women of Jeme: Lives in a Coptic Town in Late Antique Egypt (Ann 
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).

early eighth-century corpus of Aphrodito. 
This is probably because unlike the latter 
corpus, the Djeme texts are mainly written 
in Coptic. There are no known Arabic 
documents preserved from the Theban 
region in this period, and the preserved 
communications involve exclusively local 
actors. The Djeme writings contain no 
texts written by the central administration 
in Fusṭāṭ in the name of the governor, like 
the famous letters of Qurra b. Sharīk to 
the village of Aphrodito. Nevertheless, the 
documentation of Djeme did not escape 
examination in Chris Wickham’s Framing 
the Early Middle Ages (2005),1 and it has 
been the focus of rich research production 
by papyrologists, with a particular focus 
on village life and gender studies.2 Jennifer 
Cromwell’s book aims to reconstruct the 
work and world of one of the scribes of 

Jennifer A. Cromwell, Recording Village Life: A Coptic 
Scribe in Early Islamic Egypt. New Texts from Ancient 
Cultures 8 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017),  
xxiv + 287 pp. ISBN 978-0-472-13048-1. Price: $90.00 (cloth).

Marie Legendre 
University of Edinburgh 

(Marie.Legendre@ed.ac.uk)

mailto:Marie.Legendre%40ed.ac.uk?subject=


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the Djeme corpus and a member of the 
village elite: Aristophanes son of Johannes. 
He was active in the second quarter of the 
eighth century—that is, the late Umayyad 
p e r i o d .  T h e  b o o k  p l a c e s  a  s p o t l i g h t 
on the use of Coptic documents in the 
administration of the later Marwanids. 
T h i s  l e n s  a l l o w s  u s  t o  d r a s t i c a l l y 
reconsider a certain understanding of 
language use in Umayyad administration 
that has been oversimplified by references 
to the so-called language reform under 
ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān (r. 65–86/685–
705). Cromwell creates a link between 
papyrological studies, on the one hand, 
and the history of Late Antiquity and 
the early Islamic period, on the other, by 
concentrating on several hot topics in those 
fields, in relation to which the present 
review is structured: administration and 
taxation; scribal practices and literacy; and 
microhistory. 

Administration and Taxation

Chapter 1, entitled “A Scribe in His Time 
and Place,” introduces the geographical, 
political, and literary environment in which 
Aristophanes wrote: the Theban region, its 
documents, the village of Djeme as known 
though archaeological excavations, and 
its place in the administrative structure 
of early Islamic Egypt. Cromwell notes 
that the main feature of Islamic rule 
that is visible in the texts of Djeme is the 
payment of the poll tax in addition to less 
well documented taxes also characteristic 
of the new administration: forced labor 
and expense taxes for officials such as 
the governor or the amīr al-muʾminīn, 
all discussed in Chapter 4. Islamic rule 

3.  Cromwell gives him the title of pagarch, though to my knowledge this title never appears for 
administrators with Arab names. 

also appears in a few mentions of titles, 
names, and a handful of Arabic protocols 
that were not written locally (pp. 8–9). 
Most notably, an amīr, that is, an Umayyad 
administrator, was appointed over the 
local capitals of Luxor and Esna. He had a 
fiscal and legal role, as he was petitioned 
for travel permits and the settlement of 
village disputes (cf. Chapter 5). The first 
chapter also confirms that the use of Coptic 
for administrative texts was an innovation 
of the Umayyad period.

Chapter 4, “Recording Taxes,” shows 
that Aristophanes was first involved in 
drawing up fiscal documents in 724, when 
he wrote tax demand notes for the office 
of the amīr of Luxor and Esna, Sahl b. ʿAbd 
Allāh.3 He then wrote 106 tax receipts on 
ostraca between 727 and 730. In those three 
years he drew up six other texts relating 
to tax payments (safe conducts and travel 
permits). Different writing supports were 
utilized for fiscal communications with 
the amīr (papyrus) and at the village level 
(ostraca).

The tax documents are for the principal 
money taxes (poll tax, expense taxes) 
and for forced labor. P.CLT 6, dated 724, 
is of particular interest, as it records an 
unusual declaration of seventeen men on 
their contribution to naval duty, stating 
that they would provide a sum of money 
to the authorities if they were not able 
to contribute to the raids. Cromwell puts 
forward a convincing interpretation: 
the signatories were “great men” of the 
village “with the ability to buy their way 
out of the cursus” (p. 92). Less convincing 
is her categorization of this document as 
reflecting a communal burden. This claim 



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is not discussed at length, but one wonders 
whether this unique document, the only 
one mentioning forced labor in the Theban 
region, really reflects a fiscal system that 
functioned regularly with both communal 
and personal liability at the village level. 
T h e  d o c u m e n t  i s  s o  u n c o m m o n  t h a t 
the scribe utilized up to three different 
n a m e s  f o r  i t  i n  t h e  t e x t  ( h o m o l o g i a 
n-koinônikon, symphônon n-koinônikon, 
koinê homologia [p. 90]). It seems to have 
been an ad hoc initiative that does not 
necessarily reflect the functioning of the 
fiscal system of the 720s as a whole.

Most of the fiscal texts written by 
Aristophanes (p. 103) are concerned with 
the poll tax, called diagraphon in Theban 
documents. He wrote receipts for a total 
of sixty-seven men, issuing multiple 
receipts for nine of them. Payments were 
made in instalments (katabole) in the first 
part of the fiscal year (between May and 
September). The five travel permits written 
by Aristophanes were drawn up at the same 
time, after taxes had been paid. The fixed 
formulary of these receipts is presented in 
detail. All but two of the receipts for the 
poll tax were written in Coptic and those 
for the expense tax in Greek. Cromwell 
hypothesizes that the choice of languages 
depended on the destination of the receipt 
(p. 98), but she does not say what those 
different destinations could have been.

The chapter reveals that the drafting 
of tax documents was a closely regulated 
process in the twenty or so years in 
which they are attested at Djeme and that 
only one scribe at a time was involved 
in drawing up such texts. Aristophanes 

4.  The spread of areas represented by the villagers can be inferred from the mention of different strategoi 
on receipts drawn up on the same day, as Cromwell offers a convincing hypothesis that strategoi were the 
fiscal officials for the different quarters of the village (pp. 107–108).

w a s  t h e  l a s t  o f  f i v e  a t t e s t e d  o f f i c i a l 
scribes issuing tax receipts. After him 
there is no evidence of tax recording 
in Djeme. Receipts mentioned up to five 
men: Aristophanes as scribe, a fiscal 
official (strategos), two signatories, and 
sometimes a countersignatory. All of them 
except the strategos signed the receipts in 
their own hand. Cromwell suggests that 
Aristophanes might have gone around 
to different areas of the village to write 
up to sixteen receipts in one day, going 
from house to house, possibly with the 
signatories. Another possibility is that 
inhabitants would come to him (or them) 
each day from various parts of the village.4 
The latter arrangement would have saved 
Aristophanes the trouble of wandering 
around a village of two thousand souls 
carrying up to sixteen potsherds with 
him. Cromwell also convincingly shows 
t h a t  t h e  t a x  r e c e i p t s  w e r e  k e p t  b y 
Aristophanes or the village administration 
as a record of tax collections, as they were 
the ones liable for this revenue vis-à-vis 
the higher administrative authorities  
(cf. Chapter 5, pp. 179–180). The ostraca 
were kept together, as is evident from 
their acquisition history. A good number 
of them were bought together, and today 
they are housed in a limited number of 
collections.

The research presented in Chapter 6 
is the most innovative work on Umayyad 
administration to appear in the past 
decade. Cromwell provides a fascinating 
demonstration of the official training 
o f  C o p t i c  a n d  G r e e k  s c r i b e s  f o r  t h e 
p r o d u c t i o n  o f  c e r t a i n  t y p e s  o f  k e y 



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documents in the Umayyad fiscal system—
namely, those concerned with “collection 
of taxes and requisitioning of goods and 
labour” (p. 176). Such training began in 
the last decade of the seventh century, 
and it was still in full force at the time 
of Aristophanes in the second quarter 
of the eighth century. Cromwell does 
acknowledge the increasing number of 
Arabic papyri in the same period, but, as 
she shows, this went hand in hand with an 
increase in the number of Greek and Coptic 
documents and with centralized training 
for scribes in these two languages. The 
new training is visible in the script and 
formulary of administrative documents. 
It can be initially observed in documents 
drawn up in the local district capitals 
of the Nile valley, and by the time of 
Aristophanes it had reached the village 
level. He was not the only scribe with this 
training who was active in Djeme, as texts 
written by Cyriacus son of Petros, who was 
active at the same time, show the same 
features. It is not known where the training 
took place, but the district capitals would 
have been a logical choice. Cromwell sets 
the time of the eventual replacement of 
Coptic by Arabic after the 730s, though 
the change is not documented in Thebes. 
She adds that Greek was still utilized for 
administrative documents, at least in 
some regions, into the Abbasid period. She 
infers from this shift in the 730s a change 
in the fiscal system, but the nature of the 
change remains murky. She connects the 
situation to the difficulties encountered by 
the caliphate of Hishām b. ʿAbd al-Malik  
(r. 105–125/724–743). 

5.  Isaac son of Constantine went “from barely able to write his name to being able to write longer 
statements for others as well and for himself” (p. 48).

Scribal Practices and Literacy

The first three chapters will be of 
interest to anyone interested in late 
antique scribal practices and literacy. 
They reveal the fascinating mechanisms 
though which the literate and the illiterate 
functioned at the level of the village 
community. In a village context in which 
we would expect literacy levels to be the 
lowest, we find an impressive range of 
literate practices: forty-one different 
writers can be discerned in this dossier 
alone, in texts written over approximately 
thirty-five years, with evidence of younger 
scribes helping older ones, individuals 
developing scribal skills, 5 and simple 
crosses used as signatures. Cromwell 
paints a picture of literate groups in which 
professional scribes “stand in contrast 
to a greater abundance of writers who 
were less proficient. Such writers—to set 
them apart from scribes as a professional 
category—range in ability from those 
barely able to sign their own names to 
proficient writers who could write short 
texts, including letters, and who occur 
frequently as witnesses to legal documents 
or amanuenses signing on behalf of others” 
(pp. 20–21). These nonprofessional writers 
included two women.

Chapter 1 ends with an overview of the 
identification of scribes in Theban texts. 
It reveals that professional scribes were 
not identified by specific titles, though 
such titles appear for other individuals 
( G r e e k :  g r a m m a t e u s ,  l o g o g r a p h o s , 
nomikos, notarios; Coptic: sach, sacho). 
The most technical portions of the book 
are chapter 2, “Building Aristophanes’ 
Dossier,” and chapter 3, “Putting Pen on 



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Papyrus: Scribal Practices and Processes.” 
They show how texts from Djeme can be 
assigned to Aristophanes and conclude 
that 142 texts were written in his hand, 
some of them featuring his name as 
witness or amanuensis. He acted as both 
an official and a private scribe: of his 
writings, 115 documents are connected 
to taxation (106 tax receipts, a few tax 
demands, protection passes, a travel 
permit, and a tax agreement), while 
others are private documents (deeds 
of sale, dispute settlements, donations 
of children, property parcels, lists, and 
a few texts harder to characterize). A 
total of 120 texts are straightforwardly 
signed by Aristophanes, and 22 others are 
assigned to his hand. Cromwell provides a 
careful demonstration for this last group, 
stressing that texts cannot be connected to 
Aristophanes based on a single criterion, 
such as the context of the document or 
linguistic features and paleography, and 
she notes that paleographical similarities 
can be highly subjective, sometimes present 
only in the eyes of the papyrologist. This 
is why she presents the 22 texts without 
signature—or where the signature is lost 
in fragmentary documents—together. 
The text is here punctuated by several 
illustrations showing Aristophanes’s hand. 
The evidence indicates that individuals and 
families in Djeme requested the expertise 
of various scribes. Aristophanes did not 
hold a monopoly on literacy for certain 
parts of the village or for certain types of 
document (see p. 36: four scribes writing 
for a single family). 

The dating of the corpus and of the 
individual texts is also addressed in 
Chapter 2. Cromwell utilizes three dating 

6.  Walter C. Till, Die koptischen Rechtsurkunden aus Theben (Vienna: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf, 1964).

systems. The most common is the indiction 
system, as is usual for fiscal documents; 
otherwise, the Era of the Martyrs and Hijri 
systems each appear once. Here, again, 
Cromwell is careful in assigning dates 
to problematic documents, which are 
presented consecutively. She establishes 
a new chronology for the dossier with 
absolute dates between 724 and 758, 
correcting a good number of previous 
datings established largely by Walter Till.6

The most innovative part of Cromwell’s 
approach is tracking the effect of old age 
on Aristophanes’s writing in the 750s: the 
tracing of letters becomes clumsy, the ink 
pressure varies, and he displays difficulties 
in maintaining a straight line. Some of 
his late documents are even corrected 
b y  a n o t h e r  s c r i b e .  T h e s e  t e x t s  c a n 
nonetheless be attributed to Aristophanes 
either because he signed them or because 
his hand is still recognizable in the form 
of individual letters and especially of 
ligatures. Cromwell identifies a document 
t h a t  w a s  w r i t t e n  b y  a n o t h e r  s c r i b e , 
possibly under Aristophanes’s guidance, 
and only the signature is in Aristophanes’s 
hand. Information on old age and the 
ensuing need for corrections is scattered 
across Chapters 2 and 3 and could have 
been consolidated.

Chapter 2 ends with a consideration 
of dossiers and archives. The documents 
relating to Aristophanes are compiled as a 
dossier. They were not archived together 
by him or anyone else, and they were not 
his personal papers. In one he appears 
only as the seller of a parcel of land; this 
text seems to have been archived by the 
buyer. The discovery of these texts is not 
documented in archaeological records, and 



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we cannot infer anything of their original 
arrangement in the absence of accounts 
of their discovery. Acquisition records, 
however, prove useful. A few sentences in 
the texts also allow us to reconstruct some 
of the archival practices in the village and 
the surrounding monasteries. Older deeds 
of sale are mentioned in new ones and 
were certainly kept by individual families. 
Documents of child donation were kept 
in the bibliotêkê of the monastery of 
Apa Phoibammon, though it is not clear 
what exactly this meant. Overall, half of 
Aristophanes’s dossier can be attached 
to a private or monastic archive. Private 
archives are presented together in a single 
section. These relate to an individual or 
to an entire family; approximately ten 
texts can be linked to each on the basis of 
the content of the documents and their 
acquisition history.

In Chapter 3, Cromwell focuses on 
A r i s t o p h a n e s ’ s  w r i t i n g  s t y l e ,  w h i c h 
differed among the types of documents 
and between his writing of Coptic and 
Greek. Just as Aristophanes appears as 
a witness, amanuensis, or signatory in 
documents that were written in the hands 
of others, references to other individuals 
commonly appear in his writings. Some 
of these other people are identified by 
their titles (dioiketes, lashane—two titles 
for village officials—or deacon). Cromwell 
confirms that status and literacy were not 
systematically connected in Late Antiquity, 
giving the example of a dioiketes who 
could not write his own witness statement.

Microhistory

Chapter 6, “Aristophanes’ Personal and 
Professional Lives,” reconstructs the stages 
of Aristophanes’ career, his neighborhood, 

and his family. Cromwell demonstrates 
the difficulty of assessing what is in 
a name. Since Aristophanes’s father’s 
name, Johannes, is extremely common, 
it is difficult to ascertain who he was in 
the long list of homonyms attested in the 
village. She makes a strong case, however, 
for the identification of Aristophanes’s 
brother, Johannake son of Johannes. 
Despite the very common patronymic, her 
argument is based on property acquisitions 
and similarity in scribal training. She also 
identifies a student of Aristophanes to 
whom he taught the writing of legal texts, 
using the social context of their respective 
d o c u m e n t s  a n d  t h e i r  c h r o n o l o g y , 
paleography, and formularies.

In Chapter 5, “Recording Private Lives,” 
Cromwell reconstructs neighborhood 
life using about thirty documents that 
Aristophanes wrote concerning personal 
p r o p e r t y  ( h o u s e s ,  c o u r t y a r d s ,  l a n d , 
dress, equipment, marriage gifts) and 
money. These texts were written for 
the transactions and legal issues of the 
wealthiest of the village. Large amounts 
of money are at stake (between one and 
twelve holokottinoi, or gold coins; see table 
5.1, p. 147), which justifies the drawing up 
of a document by a professional scribe. 
On the other side of the spectrum, texts 
were also written for the transactions 
of those who were possibly among the 
poorest, though their status is difficult 
to establish: Aristophanes is the scribe of 
three documents of child donation out of 
the twenty-five such documents known 
for eighth-century Djeme, mostly from the 
760s and 770s. Young boys were donated to 
the monastery of Apa Phoibammon, built 
on the ruins of the temple of Hatshepsut in 
Deir el Bahari, to serve the monastery, but 



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they were not destined to become monks.7 
C r o m w e l l  s h o w s  t h a t  t h e  m o n a s t e r y 
could not act as the issuing authority for 
donation documents or travel permits. 
Monks needed to go to the village for an 
administrative scribe such as Aristophanes 
to write a petition to the amīr for them.

As for immovable property, Aristo-
phanes’s dossier shows that houses or 
even rooms within houses were legally 
divided between members of the same 
family, multiple houses shared the same 
front courtyard, and streets in Djeme were 
named (Culol Street, People of Pshumare 
Street, Palikene Street). The sale of a 
loom reached the considerable sum of 
one holokottinos, certainly because it 
was a source of income. Two holokottinoi 
were loaned for the purchase of a house. 
Scandalous affairs were brought before 
the amīr in the local capital when 10 2/3 
holokottinoi were stolen from a house. 
These documents systematically involve 
women as share owners, buyers, sellers, or 
thieves.

Texts drawn up by Aristophanes mostly 
belong wider personal archives such as 
that of Aaron son of Shenoute, “the most 
prolific property buyer in the records from 
Djeme” (p. 135), with nine sale documents 
and a testament. The descriptions of 
t h e  p r o p e r t i e s  s o l d  a l s o  s h o w  t h a t 
Aristophanes was the neighbor of some of 
his clients. Transactions took place only 
in the village and with the surrounding 

7.  Arietta Papaconstantinou has shown that these documents allow us to reconstruct the pressure the 
monasteries put on the Christian population to elicit such donations at a time when the new fiscal burden 
imposed by the Umayyad administration was causing increased economic difficulties for monasteries: “Theia 
Oikonomia: Les actes thébains de donation d’enfants ou la gestion monastique de la pénurie,” Travaux et 
mémoires 14 (2002): 511–526.

8.  Sarah J. Clackson, “Museum Archaeology and Coptic Papyrology: The Bawit Papyri,” in Coptic Studies 
on the Threshold of a New Millennium, Vol. 1, Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Coptic 
Studies, Leiden, 27 August–2 September 2000, ed. Matt Immerzeel and Jacques Van der Vliet, 477–490 (Leuven: 
Peeters, 2004).

monasteries of Apa Phoibammon and Apa 
Paul. The inhabitants of Djeme did not 
seem to invest outside of the immediate 
surroundings. 

Conclusion 

Cromwell’s book is punctuated by very 
useful heuristic tools for the specialized 
and the nonspecialized reader alike: 
there are numerous lists and tables of 
documents and, most importantly, an 
initial aid for the reader on dating systems, 
t e c h n i c a l  t e r m s ,  a n d  p a p y r o l o g i c a l 
conventions. Appendices comprise high-
quality images of ten ostraca, a catalogue 
of Aristophanes’s texts (p. 142) and of six 
others in which he acted as amanuensis, 
new editions of ten ostraca, tables with 
information gleaned from tax receipts, and 
corrections to published texts. The final 
index is rather short. For instance, it does 
not include personal names. 

In all, Cromwell masters the art of 
r e a d i n g  a n d  s t u d y i n g  a n c i e n t  t e x t s , 
overlooking no aspect of the scribal 
process (formulary, various handwritings, 
effects of old age, use of Greek and Coptic). 
She analyzes texts as objects that were 
h a n d l e d  b y  d i f f e r e n t  p e o p l e ,  s t o r e d , 
disregarded, rediscovered, and sold, and 
she tracks down the acquisition history 
of documents using the methodology of 
museum archaeology established by Sarah 
Clackson.8 A strong case is made in this 



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book for attention to detail when it comes 
to ancient documents, and the wealth of 
information that Cromwell extracts from 
a restricted number of texts is astonishing. 
The added value of this research is that 
it also firmly establishes the documents 
of Djeme as a corpus for the study of the 
early Islamic period that ought not escape 
the attention of historians of that period, 
thanks to the title on the cover and the 
focus in several chapters on administration 
and the payment of the poll tax. The book 
places a spotlight on the rich contribution 

of Coptic documents to the history of early 
Islamic Egypt, a contribution that has 
been clouded by a narrative of Marwanid 
reform that considers only the highest 
levels of the administrative hierarchy. 
Cromwell expertly achieves the critical 
balance of being thought-provoking for 
specialists in Coptic papyrology while 
remaining accessible to the wider research 
community and students of Late Antiquity. 
This book is a must-read for scholars and 
students interested in early Islamic Egypt 
and late antique history.