Copies of labour contracts in Roman and Late Antique Egypt: Institutions and society

The article explores changes in writing and copying labour contracts from the first centuries of the Roman rule in Egypt to Late Antiquity. During the first centuries, some labour contracts – antichretic loans and wet nurses contracts – were notarial documents registered in public archives and copied at least twice. Labour contracts written in chirographic form, whose number grew from the second century on, were not necessarily registered, in which case the parties had to choose whether they wanted to make a second private copy. In Late Antiquity, chirographs drafted by private scribes and authenticated by notaries (ταβελλίωνες) were the norm; in the Oxyrhynchite nome, a reform obliged the scribes to notify whether the text was copied once or more. This new habit allows us to see that only work contracts relat- ed to liturgies (fiscal collection, and public postal or transport duties) were copied twice, as was already the norm in the Oxyrhynchites in the third century. All other private work agreements and antichretic loans were issued only once, to the benefit of the employer/creditor.