“Secrets of an Ancient Trial: What a 1,900-Year-Old Papyrus Reveals About Justice in the Roman Empire”
Rediscovering The Mislabeled Greek Papyrus
According to a statement from Hebrew University, Cotton Paltiel was organizing scrolls in Israel Antiquities Authority’s Scroll Laboratory in 2014 when one of the ancient documents stood out to her. It was labeled as Nabataean — a nomadic Arab tribe from the fourth century B.C.E. to the first century C.E. — but Cotton Paltiel could see that the label was incorrect.
“I volunteered to ‘organize’ the papyri found in the Israel Antiquities Authority’s Scroll Laboratory, and when I saw it marked as written in ‘Nabataean,’ I burst out exclaiming, ‘It’s Greek to me!’” she recalled.
The document was written in Greek because Greek became the administrative language of the region when it was conquered by Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C.E. When the Romans came in the first century B.C.E., they preserved it. And Cotton Paltiel set out to translate it.
Shai Halevi, Courtesy of the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, Israel Antiquities AuthorityA close-up view of the papyrus, which was written in the administrative language of the time: Greek.
Working with an international team from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna, and Hebrew University, she and the others determined that the document contained prosecutors’ notes for a trial that took place before Roman officials in the second century C.E.
The trial had two Jewish defendants, Gadalias and Saulos, and it occurred during a crucial point between two Jewish rebellions, the Jewish Diaspora revolt (115 to 117 C.E.) and the Bar Kokhba revolt (132 to 136 C.E.).
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