Monastic Wills: the continuation of late Roman legal tradition · ? * Esther Garel & Maria Nowak This chapter examines wills composed in Egypt shortly before and after the Arab conquest, which, with one Greek exception, 1 are written in Coptic. 2 We will not restrict our discussion to wills written in a monastic context, as they do not essentially differ from the ones written by lay people. Our first aim is to present the changes that the testamentary model underwent at the end of the Byzantine period in Egypt, to highlight new elements which entered wills in this period, and show how some patterns of written communication survived into the post- conquest period. The second objective is to examine Coptic (in the sense of the language) testamentary practice, hence what steps one had to undertake in order to complete a valid will and to what extent those steps differed in comparison to the time before the conquest. Last but not least, our aim is to investigate the differences and similarities in legal and notarial/scribal practices in Egypt before and after the Arab conquest as well as ways of legal transmission: whether elements of Roman testamentary law were transmitted into Coptic testamentary practices via patterns and scribes applying them or as an effect of learned application of Roman institutions. Introduction: Wills in late Roman law Before discussing the changes of the testamentary model at the end of Antiquity, a word of introduction on testaments in Roman and Byzantine Egypt is necessary. From the beginning of the Roman period two parallel models of wills existed in Egypt: a Roman one, applied and enforced for Roman citizens; and a non-Roman one, applicable for other inhabitants of the province. These two forms of testament differed in both the requirements necessary for their efficacy and the documentary pattern applied. A Roman will had to be composed in Latin and, as in any solemn act, some requirements had to be fulfilled during its composition. 3 The content of a Roman will was also regulated by Roman law. 4 The model of will used by non-Romans in Roman Egypt is attested already in the third century BCE, and was initially used almost exclusively by Greek immigrants. 5 Its model was very different from the Roman one, as were the requirements regarding the composition of wills. 6 The situation had to change after the constitutio Antoniniana in c. 212 CE: since almost all inhabitants of the Empire became Roman citizens, no separate form for non- Romans was needed anymore. This is the reason why very a formal and somewhat unintuitive * We would like to thank J. L. FOURNET for his valuable suggestions. All remaining errors and inaccuracies are ours. 1 P.Lond. I 77, p. 231. 2 The main corpus to illustrate this phenomenon are the wills from Jeme: P.KRU 65–77; see also CPR IV 177, O.CrumST 56 and 60, O.CrumVC 5, P.Ryl.Copt. 462. 3 M. NOWAK, “Mancipatio and its life in late-Roman law”, JJurP 41 (2011), pp. 103–122, with further literature. 4 See M. AMELOTTI, Il testamento romano attraverso la prassi documentale. I: Le forme classiche di testamento (Florence, 1966), pp. 111–190. For the use of ready testamentary patterns in the Roman empire, see M. AMELOTTI AND G. COSTAMAGNA, Alle origini del notariato italiano (Rome, 1975); M. AVENARIUS, “Formularpraxis römischer Urkundenschreiber und ordo scripturae im Spiegel testamentsrechtlicher Dogmatik”, in M. AVENARIUS, C. MÖLLER, AND R. MEYER-PRITZL (eds.), Ars Iuris. Festschrift für Okko Behrends zum 70. Geburtstag (Göttingen, 2009), pp. 13–41. 5 See, however, P. Mosc. 123 (Panopolis, 69 BCE), which is a Demotic text based on the Greek testamentary model; J. M. MODRZEJEWSKI, Droit et justice dans le monde grec et hellénistique [= Journal of Juristic Papyrology Supplements vol. 11] (Warsaw, 2011), p. 374. 6 L. M. ZINGALE, “Dal testamento ellenistico al testamento romano nella prassi documentaria egiziana, cesura o continuità?”, Symposion 1995, pp. 303–312.