Multiculturalism in the Roman Army

A Receipt Book from the ala veterana Gallica

Leah Mascia and Olivier Bonnerot

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This official receipt book made of papyrus and measuring 22 × 36.5 cm was written sometime in the year 179 CE. It is a fragment of a roll which is 4.33 meters in length with receipts for faenarium, that is payments for hay, for soldiers of the ala veterana Gallica in Alexandria. The papyrus, which was bought on the antiquarian market together with 15 other documents, was probably found in Karanis, a small village of the nomos Arsinoites, which is located in the Fayyum pseudo-oasis. The ruins of this village are located near the modern settlement of Kom Aushim.

The roll was part of the private archive of Iulius Serenus, former summus curator of the ala, who retired from active service in the village of Karanis in the first decades of the 3rd century CE. The papyrus dates to the time of his active service in the village of Nikopolis (Sidi Gaber).

Image of the manuscript under infrared light with the Osiris Apollo camera with long-wave filter. This allows carbon to be detected in all inks of the fragment.

The more than 40 entries mentioning soldiers of the ala provide an insight into the multicultural panorama of the Roman army. The individuals recorded in this fragment have predominantly Latin (Iulius Marcus, Valerius Nepotianus, Marcus), Greek (Amerimnos, Theophilos, Menodoros, Dionysios, Melanos, Nephos), and Egyptian (Nepheros, Onnophris) names. However, these names do not entirely clarify the ethnic and cultural identity of the individuals mentioned, as suggested by the patronymics (i.e. fathers’ names) accompanying some of these individuals. For instance, while the name of Amerimnos’s father, Ammonios, is a typical anthroponym derived from the name of the Egyptian god Ammon, it probably has its roots in the Greek colony of Cyrenaica (today’s Libya). On the other hand, Onnophris (Egyptian, Wn-nfr, “the one who is perfect”) and his father Kollouthes (Egyptian, Klḏwȝ) bear indigenous names. Another soldier bearing the Greek theophoric name Menodoros (Greek, Μηνόδορος, “gift of Men”) is mentioned as the son of Marcus, who has a typical Latin name. Thus, the origins of the names did not necessarily reflect the ethnicity of their bearers, and many of the soldiers with Greek names, for instance, might have been Egyptians or Romans.

Armour of a Roman soldier as worn by members of the *ala veterana Gallica*.

The onomastic data recorded throughout the roll, as well as the bilingualism detectable in the morphology of the receipts, allow us to identify soldiers who came from different regions of the Roman Empire, from the western provinces to Mesopotamia, and who could speak Greek, Latin, or Semitic languages.

Each section is marked by a Greek letter visible in the left margin of the roll’s columns, the end of which is highlighted by a horizontal line running between the different entries. This division also often seems to mark textual segments belonging to different scribes. The study of the writing hands allows us to identify five different authors, most of whom seem to have had a certain level of experience and were perhaps accustomed to writing on a regular basis, although the level of each scribe varied greatly. Not all of them seem to have been professional scribes. Presumably, some were soldiers who were selected for their writing skills to write on behalf of their comrades.

X-ray fluorescence analyses show the distribution of copper in the manuscript. Copper-containing areas are shown in yellow.

This papyrus is also a very precious document for what it tells us about the history of inks, as it displays on the same dated fragment several ink compositions. At the laboratory of the Cluster, we used near-infrared reflectography and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) to analyse the inks of this papyrus, with two types being found: pure carbon inks and carbon inks containing copper.