Expert pieces together puzzle from fragments of 1,600-year-old Roman text
A Roman law expert at the University of Cincinnati edited and translated a Latin legal text he pieced together from fragments that surprisingly survived in the Egyptian sands for more than 1,600 years. What's less surprising? It's about taxes.
A Roman law expert at the University of Cincinnati, Matthijs Wibier, has painstakingly pieced together a Latin legal text from fragments dating back over 1,600 years. The text, which does not appear in other known ancient Roman books, is believed to contain imperial laws from the late fourth century. These laws likely pertained to taxation, road maintenance, grain supply, and public property rights.
The 50 fragments, which were discovered in the Egyptian sands in 1911, were obtained by the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. Wibier used ultraviolet light and ink annotations to recover the Latin text and determine the page orientation. This discovery is particularly remarkable as it does not correspond to any known imperial legal code. The high-quality scriptural writing suggests that the text was likely an official or high-end text.
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