One Thousand and One Conjectures

In the contracts of Greco-Roman Egypt, a party who could not write had a subscriber sign on their behalf, with the formula 'I wrote for her because she does not know letters' — one of antiquity's commonest documentary rituals. The surprising connection…

Petitions to officials are among the best-represented genres on papyrus, and it is well known that men in Roman Egypt could also settle disputes informally through village headmen, guild fellows, and the sociability of gymnasium and bathhouse. The connection is that women…

Everyone who reads Greek papyri meets two women: the legal woman who cannot contract without a male guardian, and the letter-writing woman ordering grain moved, rents collected, and idlers scolded. The conjecture connects the two by quantifying the contradiction: directive speech acts…

Two commonplaces: early Christian monasticism created celebrated spiritual mothers, and papyrus letters encode social rank in their address formulae. Joined, they predict a datable revolution that no law ever enacted: before the fourth century, deference to women in the papyri is almost…

Geniza men's letters glitter with biblical and rabbinic tags acquired in the study hall; women were barred from the study hall but sat within earshot of the synagogue service. The conjecture joins quotation habits to curriculum: women's letters should quote scripture at…

Geniza letters characteristically end in strings of named greetings, and Geniza households were scattered from al-Andalus to the India route; the conjecture is that letters sent by or to women carry significantly longer and more kin-dense greeting lists than male-to-male letters, because…