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This chapter introduces the documentation that will be used in the book, and discusses the types of social history that can be written on the basis of this documentation. It then explains the choice of ‘Roman Egypt’ as a unit of study, and the rationale for focusing on published Greek papyri. Finally, the overall argument of the book is outlined.

Papyrus – an Egyptian plant from the Cyperaceae family – served as the fundamental media in communicating written information during the Antiquity period. While the term ‘papyrology’ is used to refer to texts that are mainly expressed in Greek or in Latin, the texts expressed in Egyptian are studied through a specific branch called ‘Egyptology’. Upon the discovery of numerous texts of this nature, several documents were also discovered that contained vital information regarding legal rules and regulations, administrative and private correspondence. This chapter attempts to look into such findings and how these documents explain the way in which Jewish legal problems and situations were managed initially.

This concluding chapter assesses why the label of “magic” is applied, by whom, to whom, and in what circumstances. Many of the things labeled as “magic”—curses or prayers or divinatory rituals—may, depending on the circumstances, be regarded as perfectly normative. However, these ritual acts may also be considered non-normative if the same things are done by different people in different contexts (social location) or with different claims to power and authority (efficacy). The chapter then considers the ways these cues of social location and efficacy are used in the discourse of magic, both for the labeling of the self and of others. For other-labeling, the dynamics are especially clear in the legal arena, where the community or its representative are deciding where that person fits within the community. In such evidence, claims of extraordinary efficacy remain secondary to the cue of the social location of the performer. By contrast, self-labeling is much rarer and appears only in limited kinds of evidence, such as the Greek Magical Papyri, but the cue of extraordinary efficacy is the most important, and claims to extraordinary social location tend to be secondary to it. The appearance of such self-labeling, however, is unusual in the discourse of magic found in other cultures, so these examples are particularly revealing for the nature of the discourse of magic in the ancient Greco-Roman world.

This chapter explores the materiality of the kinaidos, i.e., whether any real-life individuals existed who were identified using, or themselves identified with, this term as a category marker. It centers this debate around evidence from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, where the word kinaidos appears on several papyri, two temple inscriptions, and one ostracon. By comparing these sources with literary evidence (Herodas’ second mimiamb), other papyri, inscriptions, as well as graffiti from around the Roman world, it demonstrates that actual people were given and took on this identity. Moreover, in several cases kinaidos designates an occupational category whose bearers undertook some form of performance accompanied by flute playing. However, it also points out some of the limits in analyzing this evidence—in particular, the problems which arise in interpreting the scant and often damaged papyri and the difficulties in determining precisely how these individuals might have performed.