Hermēneis in the documentary record from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt: interpreters, translators and mediators in a bilingual society

Mairs, R. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9192-9031 (2020) Hermēneis in the documentary record from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt: interpreters, translators and mediators in a bilingual society. Journal of Ancient History, 8 (1). pp. 50-102. ISSN 2324-8114 doi: 10.1515/jah-2019-0001

Abstract/Summary

Egypt of the Hellenistic and Roman periods remains the most thoroughly documented multilingual society in the ancient world, because of the wealth of texts preserved on papyrus in Egyptian, Greek, Latin and other languages. This makes the scarcity of interpreters in the papyrological record all the more curious. This study reviews all instances in the papyri of individuals referred to as hermēneus in Greek, or references to the process of translation/interpreting. It discusses the terminological ambiguity of hermēneus, which can also mean a commercial mediator; the position of language mediators in legal cases in Egyptian, Greek and Latin; the role of gender in language mediation; and concludes with a survey of interpreting in Egyptian monastic communities in Late Antiquity.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/83325
Identification Number/DOI	10.1515/jah-2019-0001
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM) Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Humanities > Classics
Publisher	De Gruyter
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