Households

What then can we learn from these texts about the size and different features of the households of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt? First, we need to be clear what it is that we are looking at. For household can be a somewhat slippery category and, whereas in a demographic context the distinction between the terms family and household is a relatively easy one to grasp, what precisely is involved in the term household is less clear (on the complexity of this issue, see the Introduction by Barrett in this volume). Family, as I understand it here, is the group of those closely related—of kith and kin or those with fictive kinship ties—and in the documentary record, this generally means coresident family members. A household, in contrast, is the unit of people who live together, both members of the wider family and other non-kin members, whether dependents, such as both free and unfree household servants, or simply others unrelated who came under a household head. We can think of households in locational terms but also in terms of function—as those who lived, ate, and slept together, or as those coresidents who joined in daily activities, whether in the rearing of children, the preparation of food, or more generally in production and reproduction. Aristotle, for example, was particularly keen on eating together as the base of the household unit (the oikos), whereas in the Florentine census of 1427 CE the hearth (fuoco) was used to designate a household.¹²

In some contexts, however, a household is not coterminous with a house. For instance, for purposes of taxation, when multiple families lived together within one house, these were sometimes treated as a single household but not always so. This is why, for this latter, composite group of families within a house, demographers have adopted the term houseful.¹³ Whether or not different family or household groups living within the same physical space functioned together under a single household head for official purposes, or whether they functioned as separate units (perhaps even with their own closed door), presumably mattered as much to those concerned as it did to those who collected their dues. Distinctions like this, important as they are, are not easy to trace in either the documentary or the archaeological record, but they do need bearing in mind.

So how large were households in Greco-Roman Egypt? To answer this question we need to consider the best datasets that we have. From Roman Egypt there are the census returns, drawn up for the payment of taxes and studied by Bagnall and Frier.¹⁴ There are also registers compiled for the payment of different taxes that can be used for household reconstruction. Earlier, from Ptolemaic Egypt, we have more than fifty household registers compiled for the levy of the salt tax which, at least in the third century BCE, functioned as a poll tax paid by men and women alike.¹⁵ Given their purpose, these Ptolemaic registers list only those liable to tax—so adults only, no children.¹⁶ This is a real limitation when set besides the Roman census returns, which not only have children but also often the ages of individuals listed. In both sets of data, however, households are primarily recorded not as residential but as fiscal units, where a named household head was, we assume, responsible for the payment of taxes for all of his or her household.

In the early Ptolemaic Period the salt tax registers that can be used to look at family and household size take various forms. They were compiled by scribes who were often bilingual (in both Greek, the language of the new rulers, and demotic Egyptian, the majority language of the population). Individuals were registered under the name of the household head. Household information was regularly organized by occupational groupings which, termed ethnē, formed a convenient means of accessing such information. For in Egypt occupations tended to be inherited through the generations, with sons following their fathers in a trade and, as with the mortuary priests above, marrying within the group. Starting at village level, this information was transmitted to the levels of district, tax area, and finally to the level of the nome before being forwarded to Alexandria. At the upper levels names turned into numbers, so it is only from the detailed registers at the lower levels that we gain the information that we need for household analysis.

The following short extract is from a bilingual tax register excavated at Ghoran in the South Fayum and now in Paris. This section, written in demotic, records small occupational groups in one particular village:¹⁷

Two features are striking here. First is the small number recorded both in each family and occupation. In this section, only the bearers of the gods of Thoeris (the hippopotamus goddess Taweret, whom Greeks identified as Athene) have more than one family registered. Second, not surprisingly, is the predominance of Egyptian names among the minor cult officiants listed. It is only with the wine merchant Agathokles that a householder carries a Greek name, but, since wine rather than beer was the beverage of choice for the immigrants to Hellenistic Egypt, this too is not at all surprising. This coincidence, between type of occupation and Greek or Egyptian name, is one found throughout these registers. It is a feature to which we shall return.

Based on this and other such registers comes a dataset of 427 households, containing 1,271 individuals, that we can use to answer some of our questions on houses and households.¹⁸ These data, however, are limited in geographical scope. Most registers are from Middle Egypt, from the Arsinoite and Oxyrhynchite nomes. Nothing comparable survives from the Thebaid, from the Delta, or from Alexandria, where the climate has not favored the survival of papyri. In terms of geographical coverage, the scope of archaeological material is far wider.

In seeking to assess the size of different houses and their constituent households, in an ideal world, we would set the documentary record against what survives on the ground. The numbers and names of inhabitants (as recorded in documents) would match the excavated dwellings (as measured on the ground). But we do not live in an ideal world, and as yet, to the best of my knowledge, we nowhere have the combination of a household record and excavated area for the same place.¹⁹ What we do have is both forms of evidence in relative abundance, and as persuasively argued by Lisa Nevett, if we consider both together, even if they are not from exactly the same location, each still sheds light on the other, helping us to frame our questions.²⁰

So what do the data from tax registers of the mid-third century BCE tell of Ptolemaic households in Middle Egypt? When Ankhsheshonq, languishing in jail, used broken sherds of pottery to record his maxims, he wrote that “it is better to dwell in your own small house than in the large house of another.”²¹ While decrying dependence, this priest well knew that houses came in different sizes with different forms of household (on Ankhsheshonq, see Barrett, Introduction). So, what do we know of households in the early Ptolemaic Period?

Figure 4.1 shows the percentage of households according to the number of adults, first for all 427 households in the dataset described above, then for the Greek households (163 units), and finally the Egyptian households (256 units) for which we have details. As already indicated above, the distinction made here between Greeks and Egyptians depends on the names of the household heads; and in just eight cases this is not known. At first sight, such a straightforward correlation between name and ethnicity might seem a simplistic one to adopt. After all, in a mixed society where marriage between immigrant males and local women was quite regular and not a few people had both Greek and Egyptian names that they used in different contexts, ethnicity was a malleable category and names formed just one possible aspect of how individuals chose to present themselves or their offspring.²² Settlers, however, military men more generally, and those in the upper echelons of the administration or certain other professions (or at least the males among them) generally carry Greek names; officiants in local cults (as just noted), brewers, and donkey-drivers all have Egyptian names. There is no one-to-one correlation between name and ethnicity; we must always be aware of exceptions. When dealing with larger groups, however, the criterion appears a reasonably meaningful one. Names can usefully serve as a convenient shorthand for designation of the two major groups within Ptolemaic society.

And if we look at the household size of these two groups, we find interesting differences that show up in figure 4.1. So, whereas in their analysis of Roman-period census returns, Bagnall and Frier found their material split according to metropolitan and rural inhabitants, here the ethnic divide obtrudes.²³

Some features are immediately obvious. Overall, two-adult families were the norm. Some 38 percent of households were of this type, and of these, 75 percent were conjugal units of married couples.²⁴ Many of these of course will also have included children, who are missing from our record. If, then, as was not always the case, a household is taken as coterminous with a house, Ankhsheshonq’s small house would indeed be the norm. Second, it is striking that the larger households of nine adults or more were all Greek, with the four largest represented by just a single example. And this pattern leads us to further considerations.

Continuing to exploit nomenclature as an ethnic denominator and exploring the detail of individual registers, we can learn still more of the early Hellenistic households in Middle Egypt. At the upper end of the scale, Greeks—those with Greek names—tended to live in far larger households than did Egyptians. These were military settler households with more family members, often with slaves and other dependents, and substantial holdings of livestock. Autoboulos, listed in a group of cavalry cleruchs, may serve as an example:²⁵

His resident sons, still living at home, were all of an age liable for the salt tax; a one-obol tax was charged on each of the animals. Like the livestock, the presence of three servants (slaves) implies a ménage that was well-off; a nurse, probably a wetnurse, suggests that there were more, younger, children in the family. Other households were larger still. For Greeks overall, 16 percent of adults lived in households of over ten.

In marked contrast, no Egyptian household consisted of more than eight coresident adults; 46.5 percent of households had just two adults in them, and those with one to three adults accounted for 77.5 percent of all households. Furthermore, most Egyptian households were just family groups. The only non-kin dependents that occur in our data are for families that most probably come from an urban context—two were nurses (likely to be free Egyptian employees) and just four were slaves.²⁶ In contrast to the situation for Greeks, in this sector of the community, slaveholding was not at all widespread. We may thus conclude from our data that household size serves to indicate the economic standing of the two main population groups in the early Ptolemaic Period.

At the same time as charting difference between groups in Ptolemaic Egypt, we can use the same dataset to calculate mean household size. For this, however, the inclusion of children is needed. In their study of the Roman census data, Bagnall and Frier adopted a multiplier of 2.909 applied to adult males to give a total that included children.²⁷ If the same multiplier is used for the Ptolemaic data, we reach an overall average household size of 4.5, or, broken down by sector, 4.0 for Egyptian households and 5.0 for Greeks.²⁸

The composition of households can be further analyzed to investigate Ptolemaic norms of family structure. What, according to the categories of the so-called Cambridge family typology, developed by the Population Group of Tony Wrigley and Peter Laslett, was the percentage of solitaries, of simple conjugal families, of those extended through the presence of coresident kin, or to what degree were households made up of multiple families? The use of this typology enables us to compare and contrast our data over time, look at differences between the Ptolemaic and the Roman Periods, and make comparisons with later data. Since, however, others have elaborated this approach elsewhere with the addition of further comparanda, and since my concern in this chapter is rather with variety, I shall not repeat it here.²⁹ Suffice it to comment once more that whereas the most striking differences are those found between the two ethnic groups in third century BCE Egypt, on the whole both Ptolemaic and Roman data fit into a general Mediterranean pattern that apparently changed little over time.

Houses

In archaeology, one of the more interesting recent developments has been a concern with the identification of the cultural preferences of different social groups through the houses they chose to live in and the artifacts and other remains associated with them. On the Red Sea coast, for instance, the different peoples who lived and worked in the ports of Berenike and Myos Hormos—the nomads of the Eastern Desert, the local Ichthyophagoi or Fish-eaters, or those coming in from the Nile Valley—may be distinguished through the faunal and ceramic remains uncovered in excavation, from the technologies they used, or traces of their varying diets.³⁰ In the Dakhla Oasis settlement of Roman Trimithis (Amheida), the different types of housing excavated reflect different social as possibly also ethnic status.³¹ The architecture and plans of excavated houses show regional differences and changes over time, which may on occasion point to the identity of their inhabitants or at least to their lifestyle choices or imperatives.³² Greek influence, for instance, has been identified in the architecture of early buildings at Tebtynis (South Fayum) and elsewhere, though the implications of this for those whose houses these were remain unclear.³³

Turning now to houses in the documentary record, we find the same contrast between Greeks and Egyptians for Ptolemaic households. Two letters from the mid-third century BCE Zenon papers well illustrate this divide. The first records one of the grand country homes built for Alexandrians in the new town of Philadelpheia in the Fayum. The Alexandrian painter Theophilos sent his estimate for the decoration of rooms in the up-country home of Diotimos:³⁴

• Memorandum from the workman Theophilos to Zenon on work for the property of Diotimos.
• For the vestibule: to decorate the cornice with deep red edging, upper wall with a multicolor dappled effect, dado the color of vetch, the lower course with a veined effect. Providing all materials myself: 30 drachmas.
• For the room with seven couches: to make the vaulted ceiling on the pattern you saw, to paint the dado and the Lesbian frieze with your desired color. Providing all materials myself: 20 drachmas.
• For the five-couched rooms, I shall decorate the cornices providing my own materials: 3 drachmas.
• Total as outlined: 53 drachmas.
• If you provide all materials, I shall do this for 30 drachmas.
• Farewell.

The decor was in keeping with the fashion of the time, and measuring rooms by the number of couches they held was the contemporary Greek standard of measurement. The most elaborate description of Ptolemaic interior decoration is that preserved in Athenaeus of the elaborate catamaran barge—a form of floating palace—of Ptolemy IV Philopator.³⁵ In this, the main reception room was a columned hall of twenty couches, while a dining room had nine couches and a bedroom five. On such a comparison, the country residences of prominent Alexandrians like Diotimos were substantial, but simply that. Zenon himself had a house in Philadelpheia, of which we learn only when one night burglars got in, forced up the trap door to the cellars, removed nineteen jars of wine, and escaped with their loot through the courtyard gate.³⁶

At the other end of the scale come the small mud-brick village houses, like that of Paapis, constructed at a total cost of just under twenty-six drachmas. Paapis too sent his account to Zenon:³⁷

Expenditure for the mud-brick house:

This was clearly a simple structure with a window and roof, probably covered by reeds, while the use of mud brick rather than any other building material was standard. These two early Ptolemaic examples can be multiplied from elsewhere. It is such individual homes that add up to make the statistics presented above.

All forms of evidence bring their own problems, which need confronting and negotiating as we seek to reconstruct the village scene or understand the backdrop to urban life. A household registered for tax cannot always be equated with “a houseful.” Owners did not always live in the houses they owned, and fractional ownership is a well-documented phenomenon.³⁸ In the documentary material there is little that allows us to distinguish between households and houses. Among the Ptolemaic salt tax registers, for instance, there is only one demotic register where the house (demotic pꜢ^c.wy) is listed as the main unit, and within this, households are separately enumerated with their different household heads. The following extract illustrates this phenomenon:³⁹

This particular village register is also unusual in recording the ages of some of the homeowners. It further provides a glimpse of varying forms of housing in a Ptolemaic village. Shrines (l. 2) might serve as homes to those responsible for them, as elsewhere could the gatehouse to a courtyard or other structures—bathhouses, for instance, or shops.⁴⁰ As suggested elsewhere in this volume, dwelling places came in many different forms (chapters 11 and 12). Normally owners lived in their own homes, as did 75 percent of owners in this register but, as in the house of Ptolemaios (l. 8), this was not always the case. Ptolemaios was a cavalry settler granted 100 arouras by the crown (i.e. 27.5 hectares or 68 acres) as a form of pension or retaining fee. He himself was nonresident; his house was let out to Mys, a man without land, who lived there with his wife, his son, and his son’s wife. This household also illustrates the regular Ptolemaic (and later Roman) practice of virilocal marriage. Further down, the house of Imouthes son of Marres is an example of a split dwelling with two separate households in it. Imouthes and his wife inhabit part of the house while the veteran Tryphon and his two children inhabit a separate part. Just how the division worked on the ground is—as so often—unclear.⁴¹

The separate listing of constituent households in this particular register allows us to appreciate the complexity of composite units of habitation. Recorded in this one register, as shown in figure 4.2, are details for just sixteen houses containing twenty-three households, a very small sector of just one Fayum village:

It is immediately clear from these data that for those living in units of two to four adults (four with two adults, three with three adults and five with four), house and household were the same—with just one household to each house. Five-adult houses were not like this: each of the three examples contains two households. And finally, the one house with 10 adults was made up of five different—and very disparate—households. Here, then, for houses with five adults or more—i.e., 25 percent of the total—multihousehold occupancy was standard. But how these different groups actually divided the living space up between them, unfortunately, remains a matter simply for speculation. This is a very small sample indeed, but similar varieties of living arrangements can be documented elsewhere, and it is clear that multifamily occupancy was reasonably common in the villages of both Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt.

A bilingual survey of the second century BCE from the South Fayum may be used to fill in further details.⁴² This house-by-house survey is still unpublished and is of a type more common from the Roman Period. The interest of the scribe who drew it up was to register houses and their inhabitants according to their location. As in contemporary land surveys with plots of land, in this register we can follow the scribe from house to house, with items regularly preceded by directions: “lying to the west,” “off to the south,” “opposite,” “with a road running between,” and so on. At times the directions get quite chatty—ēlthes, “you have reached … ” (xi.32)—and the text takes us right into an Egyptian village, though its fragmentary state causes problems when we try to draw up a village plan. Its details bring a Ptolemaic village streetscape back to life, telling much about family and household arrangements and different modes of dwelling.

The most common unit recorded is the house (oikia), but sometimes this is described as private (oikia idia), with one described as a private dower house (viii.6–8, en phernēi). Twenty percent of houses were distegos, with two stories, and of these 64 percent were inhabited by Greeks. A courtyard (aulē) was regularly appended, though sometimes this was small (aulidion); storehouses (tamieia) and mills (mylaia) are recorded, as too are palm trees. Houses might contain several oikēmata, with nine recorded in one two-story house that also had two mills (iii.13). Oikēma could signify an independent structure off the main house or courtyard, or it could be a separate room, perhaps even a separate apartment within the house, as probably here.⁴³ As in the text analyzed above (figure 4.2), this register likewise gives no indication of how houses were physically divided up between coresident households, though sometimes this can be guessed from the family groupings.

Interspersed with houses came other structures. A goose farm (iv.22, chēnoboskion) lay along one street; connected to the bathhouse were a couple of stores run by families living on the premises; this was an area where many greengrocers had their homes (xii.31–36). A two-story barber’s shop specifically for cavalrymen (xvi.33–34, koureion) lay empty elsewhere. The royal brewery was home to two brewers and their families (xi.17–22). Nearby, a shrine of Isis was managed by a certain Tharetis; her seventy-year old husband lived there also, together with their son, who—described as an Isis priest—now served as household head (xi.23–27). Shrines and altars formed a standard part of the village streetscape, where they doubled up as dwelling places. The great god Phemroeris, a crocodile deity of the South Fayum, held property here (ii.18–20).

A couple of extracts from this text demonstrate its potential for illustrating different living arrangements and patterns of inheritance: the changing lives, as it were, of dwellings. First (ix.19–36):

Here we first meet a house with four oikēmata belonging to two nonresident sisters and an illegible third. It is inhabited by a group of apparently unrelated Jews: five men with wives for three or possibly four of them. The final individual in the list (l. 31) must have shared an oikēma with one of the married couples. Then next door comes a two-generation family of Arabs. The son is registered as owner of this private house, but his mother and seventy-year-old father, a shepherd (like so many Arabs in Ptolemaic Egypt), still live with their son. Although not all houses were inhabited by their owners, they regularly passed down through the family. Here, as was normal, Tages had moved into her husband’s home on marriage. It seems clear that Ankhsheshonq’s admonition, “Do not dwell in a house with your in-laws” (9.12), was composed for a male readership.

Yet despite Ankhsheshonq some marriages were uxorilocal, with husbands coming to live in the home of their wives. Uxorilocal marriages were exceptional but occur in both Greek and Egyptian families. There are four such cases in the text under consideration, as illustrated in the following extract (vii.5–9):⁴⁴

Here Tkonnos owns the house, though interestingly her husband Pasis comes first as household head. It is probably relevant that, contrary to normal practice in this period, Pasis is known only by his mother’s name without mention of his father. Such fatherless individuals might be disadvantaged, and Nephoreis’s son was perhaps fortunate to find a propertied wife.

As often noted, patterns of habitation were fluid. Over time, as perhaps in the case of Tkonnos, a daughter inherits and the young couple supplants an older generation. Elsewhere, elderly parents continue living in the family home for the remainder of their lives. Just occasionally, the son takes over even when a father is still alive, as in the case of the son of the shepherd Teos.⁴⁵ More often, fathers continue to act as household head until their death; dependent mothers figure more frequently, with ten such in this particular register.

We have only had a glimpse of the South Fayum village recorded in this survey. Here dwellings came in different forms and size, both large and small, geese honked, children played outside, and courtyards were full of activity. On either side of the street lay houses made of mud brick, reinforced no doubt with wood, with palms and reeds to form their roofs.⁴⁶ Close by, in the early Ptolemaic village of Talei (along the canal west of Tebtynis), houses were built on stone foundations of bedrock in housing blocks of thirty by nineteen meters, laid out on a grid plan reminiscent perhaps of Alexandria. The streets of Talei were four meters wide with stone-covered drainage channels.⁴⁷ The impression of this village, in contrast, is of a more higgledy-piggledy mix of house sizes interspersed with shops and shrines. The smallest house contained just two adults, the largest twenty-three. The variety found by archaeologists is here in the documents too.

Households and Houses under Rome

Moving on to the Roman Period, figures are comparable but at the same time imply an overall increase in size of both houses and households. The record of archaeology also shows a growth in the size of settlements and the density of village housing.⁴⁸ Roman census returns give an average household size of 4.8 in the villages compared with 5.3 in the metropoleis, where urban families were more often joined by slaves and other dependents.⁴⁹ One recalls the earlier averages of 5.00 for Greek and 4.00 for Egyptian households.

If, however, the Roman tax registers that record taxpayers by both house and household are subjected to scrutiny, a somewhat different picture emerges. These were first analyzed by Deborah Hobson in her lively, innovative study of 1985. There, alongside much else, she was concerned to make the distinction between house and household and to set the documentary evidence against that of excavation. The changing pattern of families and households took place in a physical context that Hobson vividly portrays. Her figures have since been challenged, but this study remains important.⁵⁰ More recently, the same registers, with others added, have been scrutinized by Richard Alston. His adjusted averages are somewhat more conservative, but again higher than those from the census returns, and higher still than those from the early Ptolemaic Period.⁵¹ Distinguishing between urban and rural, Alston calculates 4.02–4.11 persons for urban households and 5.58–5.70 for rural; for urban housefuls he has 5.66–5.78 and for rural housefuls 7.86–8.04, somewhat lower than the figures of Hobson but strikingly higher and different from than those obtained from census records only. The discrepancy between these different calculations simply highlights the problems involved in extrapolation from very different forms of data from different periods. And in this respect the census data, scattered in both provenance and period, differ from those provided by house-by-house registers, more closely grouped by period and place.⁵² As Alston and others have observed, unlike the Ptolemaic evidence, which comes from a limited period and area, the Roman data derive sporadically from a far broader period and more disparate regions. Studies of demographic data from elsewhere show how fast change can happen even within a decade.⁵³ Noteworthy under the Romans, however, is the population increase shown in the multiplicity of registers from these later centuries.

Questions remain. What are we to make of the apparent longer-term change from the Ptolemaic to the Roman Period? Was this a real change, seen in the development of larger houses with more people living in them, both in the countryside and in the cities? Or are we, as so often, just the victims of differences in data—the different contexts from which our documents come? It is generally agreed that over time, based on immigration, land reclamation, and improved irrigation, the Ptolemaic Period saw a growth in population, especially in the capital Alexandria but also in the countryside. Of course this was not a consistent development. There were periods of internal dissension and revolt that affected the population, and periods too of low Niles, but on the whole numbers were growing, particularly in urban centers which developed still further under the Romans with a preferential status granted to the metropoleis.⁵⁴ The picture was not static and averages should always be treated with caution. Nevertheless, the population does appear to have grown overall; families were larger and houses too. What else can have lain behind such a change is too large a question to answer here, but we may at least chart this change in the context of houses and households. And here, as elsewhere, papyri both corroborate the archaeological record and, at the same time—by preserving details of house building, decoration and ownership, of household numbers, makeup, and so on—they illuminate further aspects of what was a multifaceted and ever-changing scene.

In this chapter, we have seen both the potential and the limitations of the documentary record for our study of Greco-Roman Egypt. As already noted, the main limitation to the papyrological record derives from the pattern of survival. The damper coastal climate of the Mediterranean coastline is hostile to the preservation of papyri. On the whole, Alexandria and the Delta remain undocumented areas. Modern habitation has covered most ancient cities and what has survived from the valley is sporadic in both time and place. Our knowledge of urban and rural differences is therefore limited, though better in some periods than others. And since so often the evidence from texts is for life lived in a local context, larger-scale, comparative questions are harder to treat. Variety constantly obtrudes. Questions of general settlement patterns, town planning, or architecture are difficult to answer from papyri, except in a few specific cases. In questions of ethnicity, religion, or lifestyle choices, what we can chart is also limited, sometimes puzzling, and not easy to integrate within broader patterns.

Nevertheless, the broader picture demands our attention, and the questions asked in this volume may lead us to adopt new approaches to our texts and to begin to place the houses and households of Greco-Roman Egypt in a wider Mediterranean context.⁵⁵ So on the more positive side, for some periods and places it has been possible to subject the data to demographic analysis and to reach conclusions on the form and scale of household makeup. Marriage patterns and household formation are illuminated in the official registers and census data that have survived. Like their inhabitants, houses and other property—both moveable and immoveable—were subject to tax, and therefore recorded, under the closely controlled administrative regimes of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. On occasion, the evidence of papyri allows a glimpse of the different sorts of home where these households were located; details of construction and decoration may be recorded. In no case, however, can we unite these details with known houses on the ground. Compared to that provided through archaeology, this is a limited and patchy picture. Nevertheless, through looking at the papyri, we have been able to provide a picture of the complexity of households, if not of dwelling practices, that is unparalleled elsewhere in the ancient world.

Notes

1See Hall 2002, 220–24, stressing the replacement of descent as the defining feature of Greekness (Hellenicity) by a broader emphasis on the adoption of Greek culture and language. In third-century BCE Egypt, those termed Hellenes (including Jews, Thracians and even some with Egyptian names) enjoyed a privileged tax status: Clarysse and Thompson 2006, 2:124–86.

2For this, see Thompson 2001; Clarysse 2019.

3See Bagnall and Frier 1994, 171–73, on Peter Laslett’s earlier work; Huebner 2013, 19–28; Huebner and Nathan 2017, 1–26.

4Uytterhoeven 2022.

5Thompson 2012, 144–76, 260–61. For papyrus citations, see the web-based version of Oates et al. 2001 at www.papyri.info.

6Vandorpe 1994.

7For similar studies, see Muhs 2002, on marrying the girl next door; Muhs 2008; 2015, 329–34.

8P.Louvre dem. E 3266.5.L–7.O (197 BCE), ed. de Cenival 1972, 22–24, 38–41.

9For full family tree, see Thompson 2012, 147.

10Vandorpe 2009.

11Cuvigny 2009.

12Aristotle, Pol. I 1.6 (1252b); Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber 1985, 280–336.

13Hammel and Laslett 1974, 78.

14Bagnall and Frier 1994.

15Clarysse and Thompson 2006; cf. Huebner 2013, 17–46.

16Children with ages are exceptionally recorded in W.Chrest. 198 (240 BCE), a household declaration not a tax register; ages (often rounded) are provided for just some adults in P.Count 9 (after 251/250 BCE) and P.Mon.Gr.inv. 344 + 346 (ca. 180 BCE). Consistency was not overly important in such record keeping.

17P.Count 2.67–87 (229 BCE). For new fragments of this text that affect the occupational analysis based on it, see Clarysse and Thompson 2018.

18Clarysse and Thompson 2006, 2:226–317.

19Even the case of family papers from Karanis house B17 is problematic: Nevett 2011, 18–19; so too in the case of the disparate texts from granary C123, edited and discussed in P.Mich. XXI.

20Nevett 2011, 29–30.

21Robert K. Ritner in Simpson 2003, 523, for translation; editio princeps, Glanville 1955.

22Cf. note 2 above.

23Bagnall and Frier 1994, 66–67.

24In comparison, the lower 24.5 percent for Greeks is the result of a large number of Greek singletons in one anomalous register, P.Count 47 (230 BC). What lay behind this abnormal pattern must be left to the imagination.

25P.Count 2.331–341 (229 BCE). Autoboulos may be the same as the homonymous one hundred-aroura settler recorded in P.Enteux. 91 (221 BCE).

26See Clarysse and Thompson 2006, 2:267–72.

27Bagnall and Frier 1994, 103n35, as standardly used in calculating local populations from tax statistics.

28See Clarysse and Thompson 2006, 2:244–46, for further details.

29Clarysse and Thompson 2006, 2:246–60 with table 7:12 at 255; cf. Bagnall and Frier 1994, 66–67; Huebner 2013, 46, adding Tang China, eighteenth-century Piedmont, nineteenth-century Russia, and more.

30Thomas 2012, 174–80.

31Boozer 2012; 2015a, 420–22; cf. Gates-Foster, Redon, and Godsey, chapter 12 this volume, on Bi⸒r Samut.

32Marouard 2008, 118; 2012, on Ptolemaic housing; Spence 2015; Boozer 2015a, 178–80, 407–8, regional differences.

33Hadji-Minaglou 2012, 108–12; Davoli 2015; Langellotti 2020, 19–23, with table 1.1.

34P.Cairo Zen. III 59445; cf. PSI IV 407, at the end of the job he was without funds, unable to return home to the capital. Cf. Whitehouse 2010, 1026, on decoration; Orrieux 1985, 133, other such urban structures.

35Ath. V 204d–206c; Thompson 2013, 190–93.

36PSI IV 396 (241 BCE).

37P.Cairo Zen. III 59480.5–15. See Nowicka 1969, 36 (on reeds), 116.

38See Muhs 2008.

39P.Count 9.1–20 (after 251/250 BCE). P.Count 4 and 18 (third century BCE) also record houses but without constituent households. Figure 4.2 with discussion of P.Count 9 updates Clarysse and Thompson 2006, 2:286–87.

40P.Mon.Gr.inv. 344 + 346 (ca. 180 BCE).

41Cf. P.Enteux. 13 (222 BCE), in which a widow complains that Pooris, on whom her husband had been billeted, is preventing the completion of a wall planned to divide off their billet and protect her.

42P.Mon.Gr.inv. 344 + 346 (ca. 180 BCE), to be edited in a volume of Munich papyri by Willy Clarysse and myself together with Thomas Kruse.

43Novicka 1969, 113–14; Husson 1983: 183–85.

44vii.5–9; xiii.36–40; xvi.6–10; xvii.36–37.

45ix.35, cf. xi.27.

46Davoli 2015; Boozer 2015b, on houses.

47Kirby and Rathbone 1996, Talei; cf. Viereck 1928, Philadelpheia; Davoli 2005, Bacchias and Soknopaiou Nesos; Mueller 2006, 112–21, Ptolemaic planning and its antecedents; McKenzie 2007, 19–30, Alexandria.

48Alston 1997, 26–32; Hadji-Minaglou 2007, 178; Marouard 2008, 119–25; Bowman 2011, 335; Huebner 2013, 39–41.

49Bagnall and Frier 1994, 68–69; Huebner 2013, 39.

50Hobson 1985.

51Alston 2002, 72–73 with table 3.3 (where in line 1 for 4.58 read 4.82); cf. Hobson 1985, 220–21, an average of 7.34 to a household and 11.27 to a house.

52See Alston 2002, 73.

53Cuno 2005 provides a salutary caution.

54Bagnall 2009b, 109–11, discusses scale.

55See Huebner and Nathan 2017.

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