Union Académique Internationale

This volume contains an introduction and edition of the bilingual family archive of Dryton, his wife Apollonia alias Senmonthis and their offspring. The Cretan officer Dryton, son of Pamphilos, served in the Ptolemaic army of the second century B.C. A son was born out of his first marriage. When he was about 40 years old, Dryton entered a second marriage with an Egyptian girl Apollonia alias Senmonthis, a daughter of a fellow soldier. Dryton went to live in the small town of Pathyris, south of Thebes. The couple had five daughters. The family’s archive contains a diversity of Greek and Demotic texts written on papyrus and ostraka, reflecting Greek and Egyptian traditions. The archive is important for research on multicultural societies. In the Upper Egyptian town Pathyris nearly twenty bilingual family archives have been found, dating to the second and first centuries BCE. They contain different types of documents, but contracts play an important role. Most of the Greek contracts were written by notaries (agoranomoi), whose native language was Egyptian. This study describes the language contact situation in Hellenistic Egypt in general and in Pathyris in particular. Notarial offices and scribal families in Upper Egypt are also discussed.