Text and Context in the Archive of Tiberianus (Karanis, Egypt; 2ndCentury AD)

The archive of Tiberianus consists of sixteen texts, in Greek and Latin, which were found under a stairway in a house in Karanis, Egypt. All of the texts are personal letters, the majority of them from Claudius Terentianus to Claudius Tiberianus. The archive of Tiberianus has received much scholarly attention, largely focused on the Latin letters contained within it, and particularly those with information related to the lives of Roman soldiers and veterans in the Egyptian countryside. In this paper we discuss the documents collected by Tiberianus as an archive. These texts can be identified as an archive through internal references and historical cohesion; additionally, all of the documents were discovered in the same archaeological context. Why were the texts placed together in the location in which they were found? Who were the texts' senders and addressees and how are they related to one another? How does the archaeological record support or refute the information provided by the texts? The re-analysis of these documents is necessitated by a recent re-examination of the excavation records from Karanis, which showed that there are approximately a dozen more texts from the same locus as the published archive of Tiberianus. These texts include letters that were not addressed to Tiberianus, a fragment of court proceedings and a petition. The newly associated texts shed further light on the archive of Tiberianus and prompt a restudy of the group of texts as a whole.