Knowledge of ancient Greek is required for the seminar.
This year has been devoted to the deciphering and study of a hitherto unpublished codex of eight wooden tablets belonging to the Raymond Weill collection, which entered the Louvre Museum in 1992 (figure 1). The 14 sides of the tablets contain around 26 receipts for a tax share, written by different people and all having in common the fact that they concern a single taxpayer, a certain Jacob, son of Ptôs or Tôs (depending on the receipt), who is "master of a mill"(mulonarchês), sometimes appearing with his associates.One of the receipts is written by the bursar Zacharias, a character to whom we owe another tax receipt on ostracon, theO. Ashm. Shelt. 35, dating from the 6thcentury . The comparison of the latter with the text of our tablet has enabled us to propose.
musée du Louvre, dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Christian Larrieu.
An improved edition at the same time as it has perfected the intelligence of our codex. We were thus able to identify the profile and origin of some of the writers of these texts, members of one of the monasteries of the Shenuté federation (an illustrious figure in Egyptian monasticism), located on the left bank of the Nile near Sohag, opposite Panopolis.
The great interest of this set lies in the fact that these receipts are not written in the same language: twenty are in Greek, as you'd expect; more curiously, six are in Coptic. The concomitant use of Greek and Coptic could be due to the linguistic profile of some of the issuers. But one of them, David, concludes his receipt with a few words of Greek, which seems to imply that he was a Hellenophone. And in any case, Coptic had to have been accepted for this type of use, which our file seems to attest for a relatively early period. This codex is probably the earliest evidence of the use of Coptic in a fiscal (i.e. administrative) context. And the fact that it was produced under the impetus of a monastic institution is not irrelevant to the problem of the role of monasticism in the spread of Coptic, which will be discussed in greater detail next year.
