ABSTRACT
From the eighth-century Coptic village Jēme, built within the remains of the mortuary temple of Rameses III – Medinet Habu – on the eban west bank,2 comes a corpus of texts written on papyrus that record the lives and legal wranglings of the town’s inhabitants. ese documents are written in Coptic. However, as Coptic legal texts developed from their Greek predecessors,3 Greek terminology4 and schemas5 inuenced the language and form. e majority of these borrowings are integrated within the matrix of the rst language, adapted to conform to Coptic syntactic structure.6 In addition,
1 is paper was originally presented at the XXVth International Congress of Papyrologists, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 29 July to 3 August 2007. I would like to thank Leslie MacCoull for rst mentioning Apa Rasios to me; consultation of his texts has altered many of my original thoughts, as have discussions with Sebastian Richter, Arietta Papaconstantinou and Eitan Grossman.
