Counting the People in Hellenistic Egypt

Willy Clarysse is a Fellow of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium and teaches in the Departments of Classics and the Ancient Near East at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He is the author of Prosopographia Ptolemaica IX, Addenda et corrigenda au volume III (1981), The Petrie Papyri (second edition), I. The Wills (1991) and of the Leuven Database of Ancient Books (htpp://ldab.arts.kuleuven.ac.be). Dorothy J. Thompson, a Fellow of the British Academy, teaches ancient history in the University of Cambridge where she is Isaac Newton Trust Lecturer in the Faculty of Classics and a Fellow of Girton College. She is the author of Memphis under the Ptolemies (1988).

• 1. Ptolemies, taxes and papyri; 2. The census; 3. The salt-tax and other taxes; 4. Settlement in the Fayum; 5. The people counted; 6. Counting the animals; 7. Family matters; 8. Naming the people; 9. Conclusion; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.

Review of the hardback: 'Good books are common. Great books are rare, and rarer still are great books that have the potential of moving scholarship in a new direction. Such a work is Counting the People in Hellenistic Egypt … By reconstructing 427 households containing 1,271 adults and situating them in their socio-economic context, they have laid the indispensable foundation for all future studies of the social history of Ptolemaic Egypt. All historians of Hellenistic Egypt are in their debt.' Ancient West and East