Bret Devereaux

Representational evidence gets a lot more useful if you can say 'X depicts Z event from B lit.source' or 'Z object from B lit.source' but obviously you need to have B to make that work and B is generally doing most of the lifting. 19/

3) Epigraphy. Words carved in durable materials like stone. Upside: more texts to read and also unlike the literary texts (which are basically fixed and we don't find anymore), more of these found all the time! 20/

Downsides: types of texts very limited. Mostly laws, decrees, lists. Narratives of events are rare. Very useful source for legal texts, but you need literary sources (again!) to provide a framework. But also *very* difficult to read and use... 21/

...often very damaged; typically requires specialists (epigraphers) to reconstruct the text into a form (still not english) that a historian can use. Also very narrow in scope. Very few major historical events recorded in our literary sources can be attested epigraphically! 22/

4) Papyrology (and related branches of paleography): reading texts on papyrus. Good news: much larger corpus, which includes lots of every-day documents instead of just lists and decrees. Receipts, private letters, census returns, fragments of lit. texts! 23/

Bad news! Almost entirely restricted to Egypt (and if we add wood tablets, one site in N. England). Unfortunately, Egypt is weird! It is one of the most unusual places in the ancient Med., certainly in the Roman Empire. Not weird bad, just weird different! 24/

So extrapolating from Egyptian evidence to anywhere else in terms of census data, life expectancy, family size, customs dues, etc. is very hard. Lots ?? because Egypt is different and you may not know if it is also different in the way you care about! 24/(to be continued)

Otherwise, papyrus shares epigraphy's problems: often need specialists to read and reconstruct into plain demotic/greek/latin, often damaged, lines missing, text missing, context missing. Last part is crucial - say you have a tax receipt, is it typical? 25/