Category: Roman Army

The Papyrus Series I: Egyptian Soldier Letter Home

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ 2 Comments

Back in March we first heard of this interesting letter, translated and published by Rice University graduate student Grant Adamson. From a Rice University press release:

A newly deciphered 1,800-year-old letter from an Egyptian solider serving in a Roman legion in Europe to his family back home shows striking similarities to what some soldiers may be feeling here and now.

Rice Religious Studies graduate student Grant Adamson took up the task in 2011 when he was assigned the papyrus to work on during a summer institute hosted at Brigham Young University (BYU).

The private letter sent home by Roman military recruit Aurelius Polion was originally discovered in 1899 by the expedition team of Grenfell and Hunt in the ancient Egyptian city of Tebtunis. It had been catalogued and described briefly before, but to this point no one had deciphered and published the letter, which was written mostly in Greek.

“This letter was just one of many documents that Grenfell and Hunt unearthed,” Adamson said. “And because it was in such bad shape, no one had worked much on it for about 100 years.” Even now portions of the letter’s contents are uncertain or missing and not possible to reconstruct.

Polion’s letter to his brother, sister and his mother, “the bread seller,” reads like one of a man who is very desperate to reach his family after sending six letters that have gone unanswered. He wrote in part:

“I pray that you are in good health night and day, and I always make obeisance before all the gods on your behalf. I do not cease writing to you, but you do not have me in mind. But I do my part writing to you always and do not cease bearing you (in mind) and having you in my heart. But you never wrote to me concerning your health, how you are doing. I am worried about you because although you received letters from me often, you never wrote back to me so that I may know how you.

“I sent six letters to you. The moment you have(?) me in mind, I shall obtain leave from the consular (commander), and I shall come to you so that you may know that I am your brother. For I demanded(?) nothing from you for the army, but I fault you because although I write to you, none of you(?) … has consideration. Look, your(?) neighbor … I am your brother.”

Adamson believes that Polion was stationed in the Roman province of Pannonia Inferior at Aquincum (modern day Budapest), but he said that the legion to which Polion belonged is known to have been mobile and may have traveled as far as Byzantium (modern day Istanbul).

“Polion was literate, and literacy was rarer then that it is now, but his handwriting, spelling and Greek grammar are erratic,” Adamson said, which made English translation of the damaged letter even more difficult. “He likely would have been multilingual, communicating in Egyptian or Greek at home in Egypt before he enlisted in the army and then communicating in Latin with the army in Pannonia.”

Adamson believes Polion wrote home in Greek because writing home in Egyptian was not really an option at the time, and because his family in Egypt most likely did not know much Latin.

To establish an approximate date for the letter, Adamson depended on handwriting styles and a few other more specific hints.

“Dating ancient papyri is generally hard to do very specifically unless there happens to be a date or known event mentioned in the text,” Adamson said. “But you can make a preliminary decision based on the handwriting.”

Another hint is the soldier’s Roman name Aurelius; he could have acquired it as part of a widespread granting of Roman citizenship in the year 212. And another hint is Polion’s reference to a “consular commander,” which suggests a date after 214 when the Roman province of Pannonia Inferior came under consular governance.

Because of the letter’s personal nature and common theme of familial concern, Adamson’s publication of it in the latest volume of the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists has been receiving national and international media attention. News organizations from Finland to Spain and the U.S. have written about the letter this week.

“One thing that I think is important about this letter is that it reflects the emotions of a soldier in the ancient world,” said April DeConick, chair of Rice’s Religious Studies Department and Adamson’s faculty adviser. “His emotions are really no different than those of soldiers today, who are longing to go home.”

The papyrus, which was on loan to BYU in 2011, is housed at the University of California, Berkley’s Bancroft Library.

(Rice University)

The press release includes a link to Adam’s paper in BASP: Letter from a Soldier in Pannonia and a nice little video report as well:

What is nice about this particular item — outside of the information from the papyrus, of course — is that it pretty much represents the ‘standard’ in regards to publishing of papyri. A papyrus from a well-documented provenance is studied by a scholar in an appropriate field and published in one of the journals one would expect such things to be published in. It is also nice that University press offices are drawing attention to it, with the result that it gets a fair bit of ‘regular press’ attention. Here’s some further coverage if you want to see how it was spun by the headline writers:

As can be seen, there really isn’t much ‘spin’ going on, although I really don’t like the words ‘decode’ and ‘decipher’, especially in a post-Dan Brown world (there really isn’t anything being deliberately hidden; we’re just translating some messy writing), and it’s kind of pleasant to see the Daily Mail having the most realistic/responsible headline description.

That said, our most common ‘soldiers’ letters home’ source is the Vindolanda Archive, available online. We should also mention some writing tablets found near Utrecht a few years ago which don’t seem to have received much attention in the English Press (Vindolanda-like Archive from Fort Fectio (not Utrecht) ).

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Legio VI Ferrata Camp Near Megiddo!

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ 1 Comment

Not sure why there isn’t anything about this at the IAA site … so far it’s only at Ha’aretz and for some reason they let me behind the paywall, so we’ll strike while the ‘Ferrata’ is hot, as it were:

Israeli archaeologists have found ruins they believe are the site of one of the two Roman legions based in the country between 120 and 300 C.E.

Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Yotam Tepper had long suspected that the site in the Galilee was the base of the Legio Sexta Ferrata, the 6th Roman Legion, also known as the Ironclad Legion. The other legion in the country was the 10th, based in Jerusalem.

Over the past week, an expedition led by Tepper and archaeologist Matthew Adams found the base of a battery or wall, a moat surrounding the camp, water pipes, a covered sewage channel, coins and tiles. The legion’s symbol adorned a broken shingle.

The site sits between two other historical gems: Tel Megiddo, the ancient fortified city that has been named a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the oldest known Christian house of worship, which was discovered around seven and a half years ago about a kilometer south.

Tepper uncovered the Christian site during antiquities authority digs at Megiddo Prison in 2005. Now the legion site is in focus; it’s why the area became known as Legio. In Arabic, it was known as Lajun before early Zionists restored the name Megiddo. “We’re very excited,” said Tepper, who has been excavating the Legio-Megiddo area for 15 years

The legion camp is comparable to the Defense Ministry’s Kirya headquarters in Tel Aviv, says Tepper. “That’s where the administrative-bureaucratic system dealt with the military government,” he says. “From here, around 3,500 soldiers in a hierarchical system ruled over the Galilee and part of Samaria.”

Excavations and surveys over the years found the locations of the Jewish village Othnai in the Megiddo Prison compound, and the Roman-Byzantine city of Maximianopolis near Kibbutz Megiddo. To find the legion camp, Tepper conducted field surveys and relied on surveys from the past.

“I even went to the homes of local people, who poured me out old coins from old tin cans,” he says. “In people’s gardens, we found archaeological artifacts bearing various inscriptions.”

Slowly he put together the puzzle: aqueducts, burial grounds and the ruins of a civilian settlement at the edge of the camp. There were also remnants of ancient roads and a milestone marking the two-mile mark from the camp. All this helped Tepper conclude that the legion’s camp lay under a hill.

Tepper and Adams analyzed an enhanced high-resolution satellite photo and could clearly make out the square marking the camp’s boundaries; each side was around 250 meters long. A ground-penetrating radar scan provided further evidence. Student volunteers from the United States, Europe and Australia helped out.

According to Hanan Erez, head of the Megiddo Regional Council, the plan is to build a tourism complex based around the ancient chapel and Tel Megiddo. Next week a senior official of the Catholic Church is scheduled to visit the sanctuary’s remains.

According to Tepper, the chapel offered evidence of an ancient Christian community whose members included Roman officers. This was the period before Christianity was recognized as a religion, and well before it became Rome’s official religion. The chapel was apparently abandoned at the end of the third century.

Tepper believes the legion camp was also abandoned around that time. “You can see that the camp wasn’t destroyed but was abandoned in an orderly way,” he says. “From here they moved east across the Jordan River.”

We were given hints about this back in 2006 (Megiddo Prison Update and Megiddo Prison Followup) … we’ll keep our eye open for some more detailed coverage.