The Bureaucracy of Death
October 31st 2014 - Alba de Frutos García
The virtual exhibition on mummy labels has given us some glimpses of material and religious aspects related to Life after death. However, the death of an individual in Roman Egypt was a public matter. When men with taxable status died, their close kin or widows used to submit a notification declaring their death to the village or metropolis scribe. These notifications included an application for removing the tax payer from the lists of those liable for capitation taxes and adding him to the list of the dead.
P.Monts.Roca IV 68, from the Roca-Puig collection, contains one of these notifications. The papyrus has been dated to 1st-2nd cent. CE. Unfortunately we only have the lower part of the document but it is still of some interest. The papyrus preserves the notification of death of a woman whose identity was described in the lost part of the text. The papyrus from Montserrat is therefore one of the few notifications of death concerning women. Insofar as they were not liable to the capitation tax, there was no need to modify their “taxable status” after death. In addition, the text contains an unparalleled indemnity clause that kept the declarant free of “slanderous accusations”.
Sofía Torallas Tovar y Klaas A. Worp, Greek Papyri from Montserrat (P.Monts. Roca IV), Scripta Orientalia 1, Barcelona: PAMSA, 2014.
Orsolina Montevecchi, “Ricerche di sociologia nei documenti dell’Egitto greco-romano”, Aegyptus 26 (1946), pp. 111-129.
Carlos Sánchez-Moreno Ellart, “Las notificaciones de muerte en el Imperio romano: el caso de Egipto”, en Francisco Marco Simón, Francisco Pina Polo, José Remesal Rodríguez (coords.), Formae mortis: el tránsito de la vida a la muerte en las sociedades antiguas, Barcelona: Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2009, pp. 217-252.