1,900-year-old papyrus 'best-documented Roman court case from Judaea apart from the trial of Jesus'

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A newly translated papyrus found in Israel provides information about criminal cases and slave ownership in the Roman Empire.

An orange-colored papyrus is fragmented and covered in Greek letters
The newly-translated document is called 'Papyrus Cotton' (Image credit: Israel Antiquities Authority)

Researchers have finally deciphered a 1,900-year-old scroll describing a tense court case during the Roman occupation of Israel. The finding reveals more about criminal cases from the time and answers a longstanding question about slave ownership in the region.

In 2014, a researcher organizing papyri in the Dead Sea Scrolls Unit of the Israel Antiquities Authority's storeroom made a surprising discovery: the longest Greek papyrus ever found in the Judaean desert.

Over the following decade, Cotton assembled a team of experts to decipher the 133-line text, which details legal proceedings when the region was a province in the Roman Empire. Her team's work on the document was published Jan. 20 in the journal Tyche.

The researchers found that the papyrus contained a set of notes that a prosecutor may have used to prepare for a trial in front of Roman officials during the reign of Emperor Hadrian (A.D. 117 to 138) and before the Bar Kokhba revolt began in A.D. 132 — a major Jewish uprising against the Roman Empire.

"This is the best-documented Roman court case from Judaea apart from the trial of Jesus," study co-author Avner Ecker, an epigrapher, or researcher of ancient inscriptions, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in the statement.

Related: 1,700-year-old oil lamp found in Jerusalem shows a rare Jewish menorah, even though the Romans tried to suppress the religion

The court case referenced in the papyrus text centered on two people — Gadalias and Saulos — who forged documents related to selling and freeing slaves to get around paying Roman taxes.

"Forgery and tax fraud carried severe penalties under Roman law, including hard labor or even capital punishment," study co-author Anna Dolganov, a papyrus expert at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, said in the statement.

According to the study, the document also contained a hastily jotted transcript of the trial and notes from one prosecutor to another discussing strategy.

But significant parts of the papyrus are missing, thwarting the researchers' efforts to fully understand the meaning of the text, the researchers said in the study. Missing details include where the trial took place, where the defendants lived and whether they were Roman citizens.

However, the newly translated papyrus does provide evidence for a much-debated question: whether or not ancient Jewish people owned slaves. The papyrus says that at least one Jewish family — that of Saulos and his father — owned multiple slaves, according to the study, but it is unclear if those slaves were themselves Jewish.

The document doesn't give a clear resolution to the court case, which may have been interrupted by the Bar Kokhba rebellion, according to the study. The rebellion may have caused the scroll's owner to hastily discard it in the caves of the Judaean desert, where it sat for nearly two millennia with other Dead Sea Scrolls.

Kristina Killgrove
Kristina Killgrove
Staff writer

Kristina Killgrove is a staff writer at Live Science with a focus on archaeology and paleoanthropology news. Her articles have also appeared in venues such as Forbes, Smithsonian, and Mental Floss. Kristina holds a Ph.D. in biological anthropology and an M.A. in classical archaeology from the University of North Carolina, as well as a B.A. in Latin from the University of Virginia, and she was formerly a university professor and researcher. She has received awards from the Society for American Archaeology and the American Anthropological Association for her science writing.

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