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According to official census returns from Roman Egypt (first to third centuries CE) preserved on papyrus, 23·5% of all documented marriages in the Arsinoites district in the Fayum (n=102) were between brothers and sisters. In the second century CE, the rates were 37% in the city of Arsinoe and 18·9% in the surrounding villages. Documented pedigrees suggest a minimum mean level of inbreeding equivalent to a coefficient of inbreeding of 0·0975 in second century CE Arsinoe. Undocumented sources of inbreeding and an estimate based on the frequency of close-kin unions (corrected downwards to 30% for Arsinoe) indicate a mean coefficient of inbreeding of F=0·15-0·20 in Arsinoe and of F=0·10-0·15 in the villages at the end of the second century CE. These values are several times as high as any other documented levels of inbreeding. A schematic estimate of inbreeding depression in the offspring of full sibling couples indicates that fertility in these families had to be 20-50% above average to attain reproduction at replacement level. In the absence of information on the amount of genetic load in this population, this estimate may be too high

The Roman army was actively present in the Eastern Desert of Egypt in the 2nd century CE, from Trajan to Antoninus Pius. Soldiers lived in small forts, called praesidia, along the roads from the Red Sea to Nile. Results of numerous desert surveys indicate that the Roman route system in the Eastern Desert was elaborate and sophisticated. As well as by Egyptians the roads were also used by speakers of other languages, e.g. Nabateans, Arameans, but also speakers of North Arabic and South Arabic varieties and languages of the Balkans. Soldiers, mainly auxiliares from Egypt, lived with locals, and both groups actively corresponded between the praesidia mainly in Greek writing on potsherds, ostraka. The extra-linguistic background of the letters was multicultural and, thus, multilingual. This kind of language contact could be seen also earlier, but it was not as clear as later. Living in an extremely difficult area, people had to be able to write or they had to find someboby who had – even very modest – writing skills. An important fact is that the writers used only ostraka, never papyrus, which they did not own. Conclusions: the 'ostraka' variety in the Eastern desert seems to differ from the 'papyrus' variety used in the Nile valley. This variety could be characterized as a striped cocktail, i.e. memorized phrases mixed with very shaky Greek (or, very occasionally, Latin), where elements of everyday phonetics are combined with learnt orthography and hypercorrect forms, as well as L2 induced uncertain morphology and syntax. The multilingualism of Egypt is a major factor to our understanding of the Greek spoken in Egypt. There might have been an Egyptian variety of Greek influenced by language contacts, but individual writers have a lot of variation that is not always typical of the whole. All contact induced variation is certainly not caused by Egyptian speakers, but some of it was – without any doubts. I would argue that language internal change in Greek was more rapid in regions that were multilingual. ; The Roman army was actively present in the Eastern Desert of Egypt in the 2nd century CE, from Trajan to Antoninus Pius. Soldiers lived in small forts, called praesidia, along the roads from the Red Sea to Nile. Results of numerous desert surveys indicate that the Roman route system in the Eastern Desert was elaborate and sophisticated. As well as by Egyptians the roads were also used by speakers of other languages, e.g. Nabateans, Arameans, but also speakers of North Arabic and South Arabic varieties and languages of the Balkans. Soldiers, mainly auxiliares from Egypt, lived with locals, and both groups actively corresponded between the praesidia mainly in Greek writing on potsherds, ostraka. The extra-linguistic background of the letters was multicultural and, thus, multilingual. This kind of language contact could be seen also earlier, but it was not as clear as later. Living in an extremely difficult area, people had to be able to write or they had to find someboby who had – even very modest – writing skills. An important fact is that the writers used only ostraka, never papyrus, which they did not own. Conclusions: the 'ostraka' variety in the Eastern desert seems to differ from the 'papyrus' variety used in the Nile valley. This variety could be characterized as a striped cocktail, i.e. memorized phrases mixed with very shaky Greek (or, very occasionally, Latin), where elements of everyday phonetics are combined with learnt orthography and hypercorrect forms, as well as L2 induced uncertain morphology and syntax. The multilingualism of Egypt is a major factor to our understanding of the Greek spoken in Egypt. There might have been an Egyptian variety of Greek influenced by language contacts, but individual writers have a lot of variation that is not always typical of the whole. All contact induced variation is certainly not caused by Egyptian speakers, but some of it was – without any doubts. I would argue that language internal change in Greek was more rapid in regions that were multilingual. DOI:10.4424/lam72018-7 ; Peer reviewed

A Favourable Horoscope: 'If a son is born when the Sun is in the terms of Mercury, he will be successful and have great power … He will be brave and tall and will acquire property and moreover will be married to his own sister and will have children by her.'

Sexuality in the ancient world has received much scholarly attention in the last few years, but authors have tended to confine themselves to the literary sources from Greece and Rome. There has also been a concentration on issues of social dominance and control at the expense of analysing the emotional and experiential aspects of sexual life, for which Egypt is a unique source. This is the first comprehensive study of sex in ancient Egypt. It considers sex in its broadest sense, analysing not only the sexual practices of individual people but also the ways in which sexual activity was indivisibly woven into the fabric of social and communal life. The main sources are the innumerable private documents written in Egypt during the Graeco-Roman period, and almost miraculously preserved by the dry climate. All types of documents are used, from magic spells for winning over a lover to judicial accounts of sexual crimes, many of them translated here into English for the first time. From these fragments, a world has been reconstructed in which real people move and function as sexual beings. This is an innovative addition to our knowledge of the ancient world, and has much to say about the construction of sexuality in the ancient world, about notions of the self and the sexual self, and about the ways that people inhabited their bodies

The aim of this work is to investigate how in Roman Egypt, double names were used by the local elite to promote their social status. Polyonymy (i.e. the use of multiple names) is found in Egyptian texts as early as the Old Kingdom, and during the Ptolemaic period the practice is adopted in Greek environments as well. At this time, double names generally combined a Greek and an Egyptian name and reflected the complexity of ethnic identity in Ptolemaic society. It is in the Roman period, however, that numbers rise spectacularly--from roughly 1% at the beginning of Roman rule, to over 6%, peaking under the Severans. This upsurge of double names was triggered for a reason--a study of the phenomenon may paint a picture of the ideals and aspirations underlying this choice

The aim of this work is to investigate how in Roman Egypt, double names were used by the local elite to promote their social status. Polyonymy (i.e. the use of multiple names) is found in Egyptian texts as early as the Old Kingdom, and during the Ptolemaic period the practice is adopted in Greek environments as well. At this time, double names generally combined a Greek and an Egyptian name and reflected the complexity of ethnic identity in Ptolemaic society. It is in the Roman period, however, that numbers rise spectacularly--from roughly 1% at the beginning of Roman rule, to over 6%, peaking under the Severans. This upsurge of double names was triggered for a reason--a study of the phenomenon may paint a picture of the ideals and aspirations underlying this choice