The group of forty-seven Ptolemaic copper coins (Fig. 13), the preservation of which is unusually good for coins found in Upper Egypt, new coinage rarely getting so far south, belong apparently to the dominations of Ptolemies III and IV. They are of four sizes and in detail are as follows:—
CHAPTER IX
DEMOTIC PAPYRI AND OSTRACA
By Wilhelm Spiegelberg
THE two papyri which I propose to call in future Papyrus Carnarvon I and II are of great importance on account of their date.[21] They both bear the protocol of a local king who reigned in Upper Egypt under Ptolemaios Epiphanes (205-181 B.C.). The king is named Harmachis, and so far there are known to exist only three other contracts of his time, two in the Berlin Museum (Demotic Pap. Berlin, Nos. 3142-4, 3145), dated in his third and sixth years, and another mentioned in the Revue Égyptologique, I, p. 121 (the collection in which it is preserved not being mentioned), is dated in his fifth year.
The two Carnarvon papyri are dated in the fourth year, and their protocol reads: ‘Year 4 in the month of Athyr of King Harmachis, living eternally, beloved of Isis, beloved of Amonrasonter, the great god.’
In the first papyrus (Pap. Carnarvon I, Pls. XXXV, XXXVI) a woman Senobastis sells 1½ cubits of waste land (about 40 square metres), situated in the endowed land of the god Amon near a place P-ohi-n-p-mehen, to a herdsman (?) and slave of the god Amon, Psenesis.
The second papyrus (Pap. Carnarvon II, Pls. XXXVIII, XXXIX) concerns a sale of arable land in the same region between the herdsman (?) and slave of the god Amon, Pachnumis and Paos bearing the same titles.
Paos and Psenesis were brothers, a fact which makes the two papyri part of the acts of the same family. They are signed by the same public notary, ‘Petamenophis, the son of Petemestus, ... who writes in the name of the priests of the god Amonrasonter,’ and among the sixteen witnesses on the verso of the papyri eleven are identical in both texts ([Pl. XXXVII]. 1 and 2).
These two documents concern two different sales of temple land in the same Theban region between different contractors, of whom two are members of the same family. As we know that in Ptolemaic and Roman times every sale was concluded by two documents, the agreement for sale (συγγραφἠ πρἁσεως) and the contract of cession (συγγραφἠ ἁποστασἱου), it is evident that we have only half of the complete acts of the two sales, viz. the sale agreements. Now in Pap. Carnarvon I on the right margin opposite line 4 there is a part of a sign (not given in the plate) which may be the end of a line of another text. This may belong to the lost contract of cession written upon the same roll as the existing written agreement. At any rate the two documents are not complete, they are only the sale agreements, and their juridical complements, i.e. the Cession Acts, may still turn up some day.