The major part of some 70 extant Coptic lease documents and some 30 rent receipts comes from the Hermupolite region, especially from Shmoun/Hermupolis and Antinoupolis. Coptic leases did not receive much attention so far, and Coptic documents from the Hermupolite area, with the enjoyable exception of the Bawit monastery, are generally under-researched. The Coptic evidence adds more than thirty items to the corpus of late (6th/7th-century) Greek misthosis leases and seven documents to the sparse evidence of Greek long-term (emphyteutic) leases. Although assigning dates to Coptic documents is a problem, Coptic leases from the Hermupolite region seem at least partly to overlap chronologically with the latest Greek documents of this provenance. The announced paper will draw some information on the practice of lease business in the late Byzantine Hermupolite area from the widely unknown Coptic evidence and discuss its common features and its peculiarities against the contemporary or slightly earlier Greek evidence.
Talk
Plots, People, Produce, Payments: Lease Business in the 7th-Century Hermupolite Region according to Coptic Lease Documents
Prof. Dr. Tonio Sebastian Richter