The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 96 (2010), xx–xx ISSN 0307-5133 CONDITION(AL)S OF REPAYMENT: P. CLT 10 RECONSIDERED * By JENNIFER CROMWELL and EITAN GROSSMAN This article is a re-edition of P. CLT 10, which was originally published with minimal commentary, no image, and a number of transcription errors. Subsequent published translations improved understanding of the text, but were not made in consultation with the original manuscript. The re- edition of the text, with the irst published image of this document, is accompanied by a linguistic analysis. This highlights a number of grammatical features characteristic of Theban legal documents such as the performative eiswtm and the negative protatic eftmswtm. Addressing them explicitly paves the way for a better understanding of such texts, which are often diicult to interpret. P. CLT 10, 1 a Coptic document from the seventh/eighth century village Jeme, 2 records the acknowledgement of a loan, and the promise to repay it, between Maria daughter of Martha (the irst party and debtor) and Severos (the second party and creditor). 3 The debt incurred is 3⅓ holokottinoi. 4 Various conditions, including the preferred method of repayment, an alternative payment, and the timeframe involved, are also recorded. The stipulations of the document are written in the language variety typical of Theban documents of the period, which difers considerably from the standardized Sahidic of pre-conquest literature. The linguistic repertoires of Theban scribes are still poorly understood in terms of their sociolinguistic context and their linguistic systems, 5 * We would like to thank the Bodleian Library, Oxford, in particular Gillian-Mary Grant and Colin Wakeield, for allowing us to study the manuscript and to publish an image of it here. We are also grateful to the Griith Institute, Oxford for access to Crum’s archive, and for their various comments and suggestions; we also thank Anne Boud’hors (Paris), Chrysi Kotsifou (Oxford), and Sebastian Richter (Leipzig), as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and criticism on an early version of this paper. 1 Editions of texts are cited using the standard system of abbreviations in J. F. Oates, R. S. Bagnall, S. J. Clackson, A. A. O’Brien, J. D. Sosin, T. G. Wilfong, and K. A. Worp, Checklist of Editions of Greek, Latin, Demotic and Coptic Papyri, Ostraca and Tablets (5th edn; BASP Supplements 9; Oakville, 2001). This is updated online at: < http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/papyrus/texts/clist.html/ >. P. CLT 10 was irst published in A. A. Schiller, Ten Coptic Legal Texts (New York, 1932), 80–3. 2 For the village, see the overview provided by T. G. Wilfong, ‘The Western Theban Area in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries’, BASP 26 (1989), 96–103 and id., Women of Jeme: Lives in a Coptic Town in Late Antique Egypt (Ann Arbor, 2002), 1–22. 3 There are no other attestations of Maria daughter of Martha in the written record; this text is the only one listed for her by W. C. Till, Datierung und Prosopographie der koptischen Urkunden aus Theben (SÖAW 240/1; Vienna, 1961), 136. There are a number of Marias known by their patronymic, and it is possible that she is one of these, but it is impossible to make any certain connection. As a result of damage to the papyrus, it is not possible to identify Severos with any other known individual; not only is his patronymic destroyed but the name itself is damaged. Till, Datierung, 198–9, does not include this example under his entry for the name Severos. 4 The holokottinos is the Coptic term for the gold coin of the period, equivalent to the Latin ‘solidus’, Greek ‘nomisma’ and Arabic ‘dinar’; see T. S. Richter, Rechtssemantik und forensische Rhetorik: Untersuchungen zum Wortschatz, Stil und Grammatik der Sprache koptischer Rechtsurkunden (Kanobos 3; Leipzig, 2002), 332–3. The Coptic term is used here in preference to either the Latin or Greek (the former of which does not occur in the Jeme corpus). 5 As has most recently been noted by T. S. Richter, ‘Zur Sprache thebanischer Rechtsurkunden: Aufällige Konstruktionen im Bereich der Zweiten Tempora’, in M. Immerzeel and J. van der Vliet (eds), Coptic Studies on