Matthijs Wibier’s love of Latin first drew him to Classics. Years later, that fascination brought him to 50 tattered scraps of animal skin at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, where faded Latin sentences stopped at torn edges.
When Wibier joined the seven largest pieces into a double-sided page, he found a set of especially specific laws. One damaged passage appears to put wealthy citizens on the hook for road repairs and grain. Another warned people to stop treating public buildings as private property.
None of the surviving Roman legal codes contains this kind of text. Wibier thinks the page may have come from a Roman pocket law book, a small late-fourth-century collection that a traveling official could carry. Wealthy landowners or their lawyers may also have used it.
“We don’t have a book like this that we know of, which makes it the first of its kind,” Wibier said in a press release.
How Wibier Reconstructed the Roman Law Book
The Penn Museum obtained the fragments from an antiquities dealer in Egypt in 1911. The animal-skin page is the only Latin manuscript among the museum’s hundreds of texts from Egypt.
Wibier used ultraviolet light to make the faded ink easier to see. He also studied the physical differences between the two sides of the skin. One side was smooth, while the other had more texture. Three marks in red ink appeared on only one side.
Explore All OptionsAltogether, those details allowed Wibier to work out the page order. The textured surface would have appeared on the right when the book was open. After a reader turned it, the smoother surface appeared on the left.
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Why This Roman Law Book Was Different
His closest point of comparison was the Theodosian Code. Spread across 16 books, it preserves more than 2,500 imperial decrees issued from 311 to 437. Wibier does not think the Penn parchment came from either of the two books covering similar subjects, although he cannot completely rule it out.
The laws on the parchment date to the reigns of Constantius II and Julian, who ruled between 337 and 363. The neat, polished handwriting points to a carefully produced book. Rather than collecting thousands of decrees, it may have included only the rules useful to its owner.
What Roman Tax Laws Reveal About the Empire
To Roman emperors, roads, grain, taxes, and public buildings were all tied to keeping the empire supplied and under control. Roads carried people, goods, and soldiers, while grain fed the military and large cities such as Constantinople. If the food supply failed, public unrest could threaten the government.
Much of the cost fell on the wealthy, and their contributions helped maintain roads and keep cities supplied with grain. The warning about public buildings shows some people may have already treated shared property as though they owned it.
A compact book could put the laws an official or taxpayer actually needed in one place. The enormous codes were not the only way Roman law circulated.
Someone once opened that book because they needed to know who had to repair a road, supply grain, or pay. More than 1,600 years later, Wibier could read part of it again.
“I love languages, Latin in particular. Working on these pieces and seeing how they fit together was tremendously gratifying,” he said in the press release.
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Article Sources
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- This article references information from the University of Cincinnati: Roman law expert pieces together ancient legal history UC Classics professor reveals laws obscured in 1,600-year-old puzzle
