So I got sick on Monday night and this morning, the hot water heater broke. I gotta find some amusement as I'm digging out of all that today. So: P.Cotton.
This is a cursive found in the Judaea / Arabia provinces. That, for those paying attention, restricts our time period to AD 106-135ish. The document further cites not-yet-divine Hadrian and his agent a "Rufus", who in turn would be Tineius "the Red" AD 129-132. The rebellion which became Bar Kochba's Jewish amirate hasn't started yet.
It took them all this long to get it translated because until 2014 it was misfiled, amongst some Nabataeana. The cursive here was rather Greek. As to what-all was going on, the preservation hasn't much helped. What we do get is Roman legal cant transferred into Greek without the medium of Hellenistic legal culture. Famous phrases still used today like "in good faith" / bona fide are simply calqued. This papyrus can sit alongside Aegyptian provincial law texts from Oxyrhynchus.
Enough survives to assign to it a genre: a legal stage-script, for the courtroom. The defendant's counsel is drafting-up scenarios they'll likely hear from the prosecution. Their clients are known Rome-haters and cheats, but that's not what they're in court for, right now. Their (unenviable) task is to clear their clients of forgery and tax fraud, in the service of such crimes they were shuffling slaves about (somehow).
Dolganov et al. observe that a storm is coming, so can't say if the trial ever even happened.
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