Expert pieces together puzzle from fragments of 1,600-year-old Roman text

A Roman law expert at the University of Cincinnati edited and translated a Latin legal text he pieced together from fragments that surprisingly survived in the Egyptian sands for more than 1,600 years.

What’s less surprising? It’s about taxes.

UC Classics Assistant Professor Matthijs Wibier translated the double-sided page, which does not appear in other known books from ancient Rome. He said the text likely is from a small compilation of imperial laws from the later fourth century that was distributed for official use by tax officials or for private use by landowners or their attorneys.

“We don’t have a book like this that we know of, which makes it the first of its kind,” Wibier said. “I don’t think it contained thousands of laws like most of the Roman codes we know. I think it was a book that traveling officials could put in their pocket.”

Made from animal skin, the 50 fragments come from a collection of other Egyptian antiquities at the Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The museum obtained the fragments from an antiquities dealer in Egypt in 1911.

With the help of the museum, Wibier pieced together the page like a puzzle from the seven largest tattered fragments that together resemble an island archipelago.

These pieces add to our understanding of imperial law under two emperors, Constantius II and Julian the Apostate, who ruled between 337 and 363, Wibier said.

Translating even fragmentary texts is extremely valuable because precious few books from that period survive intact. Scholars must rely on damaged or partial manuscripts to recreate them. And these laws, in turn, tell scholars about daily life, society and the economy in ancient Rome, from the priorities of the government to how private conflicts were resolved.

Wibier said one side of the page has three examples of red ink that were added to highlight something of importance.

From clues like the absence of these highlights on the reverse side of the page along with the imperial decrees discussed, Wibier was able to determine which way the pages faced in the book. One side of animal skin is smooth while the other is more textured. The textured side of the page came first, representing the odd-numbered page that sits on the right side of the book when opened, which means the opposite side of the animal skin appeared on the left side of the opened book.

Wibier used an ultraviolet light to help draw out the contrast in the ink for the recovery of the Latin text and its translation. His interest in Latin is what first drew him to Classics, he said.

“I love languages, Latin in particular. Working on these pieces and seeing how they fit together was tremendously gratifying,” he said.

The target audience for the book likely were Roman officials who had to enforce the laws or wealthy taxpayers and their lawyers, he said.

“To dodge the law, you have to know the law,” Wibier said. 

“What makes this discovery particularly remarkable is that, unlike nearly all other fragmentary Roman law books, this text does not correspond to any known imperial legal code,” said UC Professor Daniel Markovich, head of UC’s Department of Classics.

“If I had to guess this could have been an official’s book,” Wibier said. “It was very carefully produced. The handwriting is very beautifully done. This is very high-end scriptorial writing.”

What laws did it contain?

“They spoke of the public road system and raising taxes to maintain public infrastructure,” Wibier said. “If I had to speculate, this was a law saying wealthy citizens had to keep the roads in good shape and provide grain for the food supply.

“Another law warned people to stop treating public buildings like they were private property,” he said.

Wibier described the painstaking work that went into the translation in a chapter of the upcoming book “Il Codice Teodosiano“ edited by Detlef Liebs and Dario Mantovani scheduled to be published this year by Pavia University Press. The project was supported with grants from the European Research Council and the Semple Classics Fund.

Wibier acknowledged the valuable assistance of the Penn Museum. The museum preserves hundreds of manuscripts from Egypt, many surviving in fragments, said Jennifer Houser Wegner, the museum’s curator-in-charge for the Egyptian collection. The museum’s texts appear on a range of materials from papyrus to vellum to animal skin. And they are in variety of scripts from Egyptian hieroglyphs to languages ranging from Coptic to Arabic to Hebrew and Greek.

“Beyond its interesting content, Wibier’s research on this parchment highlights the immense potential within museum collections that house unpublished manuscripts,” Houser Wegner said.

“As these fragmentary texts receive greater scholarly attention through careful study, translation and commentary, these documents have the possibility of expanding our understanding of the ancient world.”