Archeologists Spent A Decade Deciphering 1 Roman Court Document. Here's What They Learned

Who doesn't love a good courtroom drama? You've got the impassioned attorney striding in front of the jury and delivering a heart-swelling tale meant to sway even the most hardened of hearts, the hard-ass judge banging the gavel when things are out of order, the embittered relative yelling curses from her seat in the crowd, and other such stock happenings. And wouldn't you know it? The ancient Romans loved a good courtroom drama, too. In fact, you could say that they invented our modern courtroom format, right down to prosecution vs. defense, witnesses for either side, the presentation of material evidence, a jury of peers, and so forth. So if we can get our hands on court documents from ancient Rome, we can learn quite a lot about life back then.

That is, we can learn a lot with a lot of effort, even if it takes a decade to decipher a mere 133 lines. This was the endeavor undertaken by four researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem after discovering a tattered sheet of papyrus in the Dead Sea Scrolls Unit at the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) in 2014. This is a cool enough find, but it took a tremendous amount of work to decipher it, in no small part because big chunks of the papyrus are missing. But what researchers did find is quite interesting, summed up by the title of their paper. Published in the journal Tyche out of the University of Vienna, the title reads: "Forgery and Fiscal Fraud in Judaea and Arabia on the Eve of the Bar Kokhba Revolt."

So why, the reader might wonder, was this very interesting Roman court document just sitting around the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) in the Dead Sea Scrolls Unit with no one looking at it? To answer this question, let's look at the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, which were discovered from 1947 to 1956 sheltered in a series of 11 caves in the rocky Judaean Desert northwest of the Dead Sea. Originally placed under the guardianship of what was called the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, the scrolls passed to the Israel Antiquities Authority in 1967. There was also a new cache of scrolls found in 2017, making about 1,000 scrolls altogether.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are over 1,800 years old, and tend to get attention for their religious writings, like the Hebrew Old Testament and books of the Apocrypha. But there were also legal documents in the mix, especially related to the Bar Kohba revolt of Jews against the Roman Empire (132 to 135 C.E.).  This is because the Dead Sea Scrolls, including the recently deciphered court case, are Jewish in origin. This also means that they're written in either Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, including the Aramaic dialect, Nabataean. 

Back in 2014, when researcher Hannah Cotton came across the newly deciphered Roman court document at the IAA, the document's label said "Nabataean." But, it was clearly written in Greek. This clerical error might have been part of the reason why it was hanging around so long, untouched.

The entire Tyche-published report on the newly deciphered Roman court trial is 135 pages long, so we can only cover broad strokes here. But, let's just say that the case would make an excellent courtroom show or play. Even the people mentioned in the document read like a cast of characters. There are 12 participants in the trial, including two defendants, Gadalias and Saulos, their partners-in-crime Chaereas and Diocles, a Roman governor named Rufus (probably governor of Judaea, Tineius Rufus), a Roman governmental official named Postumus, a Roman centurion (military commander) named Lectus, and three enslaved people: Abaskantos, Onesimos and Niko-something (the last part of the name is missing). There are also two other people, Flaccus and Primus, who speak in the document even though we don't know what they did during the trial. If this doesn't sound like a screenplay in the making, we don't know what does.

Ultimately, the case involved forgery and an attempt to defraud the Roman government and "deprive the fiscus [imperial treasury] of its due." Rome was big about taxes, to the point where tax fraud potentially carried the death penalty. Nonetheless, Gadalias and Saulos lied on some documents in order to "cheat their property assessment." Slaves were considered property, so owning them added to one's equity and the amount of taxes that one had to pay. While Gadalias and Saulos' plot isn't perfectly clear, one possibility is that they lied about having manumitted (freed) slaves in order to reduce their property value so that they paid less taxes.

Now we come to the next layer in the Roman court document puzzle, one that connects it to a place and time in Roman history. We mentioned that the document was found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls. This alone tells us a lot, as it was probably brought to the Judaean Desert by a Jew fleeing the Romans. Many of the caves in the Judaean Desert — the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found — were used as safe havens during the Bar Kokhba Revolt. Jews who fled Roman authorities brought important possessions with them, including legal documents. And since the revolt happened from 132 to 135 C.E., but when Tineius Rufus was governor (129 to 132 C.E.), then that's our time frame for when the trial took place. The trial also probably took place after Emperor Hadrian visited the region in 129/130 C.E.

As for the case itself, it speaks volumes about Jewish life under Roman rule, as all residents of the empire — regardless of religion, nationality, ethnicity, or culture — had to conform to Rome's laws. It also tells us definitively that Jews in the empire did indeed enslave people, a point that remained in question until now. Furthermore, it provides a window into the local legal proceedings of what was a distant and easily ignored region of the empire far from the capital. And while it took the research team at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem 10 years to learn what it has, there still might be more to learn.