Coptic Legal Documents

This volume contains annotated English translations of fifty selected legal documents originally written in the Coptic language, dating from the mid-sixth to the mid-eighth centuries. They include land transfers, sales, wills, property divisions, and intergenerational disputes. The choice of which language to use in recording their transactions was significant for the documents' framers, and the introduction sets these Coptic texts in their historical contexts of the changing society of Egypt, first under Byzantine rule, then under Islamic rule. Since the originals are in a language not known to most classicists or medievalists, making the documents available in English will enable them to be read, studied, and appreciated by a wider audience.

LESLIE S.B. MACCOULL is a papyrologist specializing in Coptic documents and in the social and cultural history of late antique Egypt. She is Senior Research Scholar of the Society for Coptic Archaeology (North America) and an Academic Associate of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.