Featured Article Summary #251

Menches was an ancient Egyptian official who worked as the village scribe in Kerkeosiris from before 119 to 110 BC. He lived during the Ptolemaic period, when Greece ruled Egypt, and he was also known by the Greek name Asclepiades. His main job was to document farming and land use and to judge how much tax the people owed to the pharaoh. In 118 BC, he was cleared of an attempted murder charge and then asked for royal protection from harassment, during a time when unrest affected local work, including strikes by scribes and farmers. Later, the government granted him land, though this was usually given to soldiers, and he also shared his scribe role with Petesouchos in 111 BC. Most of what we know about him comes from papyrus documents found in a temple store in Tebtunis, which were excavated in 1900 and later translated, forming the “archive of Menches,” an important record of life in Ptolemaic Egypt. Menches lived during the Ptolemaic period, which started after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332BC. After Alexander died, his general Ptolemy I took control in 323BC and began the Ptolemaic dynasty. Menches lived in the village of Kerkeosiris in Egypt’s Faiyum Oasis. The village was likely founded in the early 3rd century BC during land-reclamation work by the Ptolemies, when Greek soldiers were given farmland and many Greek immigrants were settled across Egypt. Kerkeosiris was intended as a Greek settlement, with much of its land allocated to these soldiers. Little is known about Menches’s life because only a few papyrus letters survive, and his birth date and most personal details are not recorded. He was one of several sons of Petesouchos and Thasis, and his brother Polemon was the chief administrator of Kerkeosiris; another possible brother, Mestasutmis, is not certain because “Petesouchos” was a common name. Menches’s name means “He who is perfect,” and he was also known by the Greek name Asclepiades, reflecting the common use of both Egyptian and Greek names. A 112 BC contract calls both Menches and his father “Greek of the country,” which may suggest Greek ancestry mixed with Egyptian life, or that “Greek” referred to a privileged legal or tax status in Ptolemaic Egypt. Menches was the komogrammateus, or village scribe, a low-ranking but influential official appointed through Egypt’s finance administration. He was responsible for keeping records of villagers and farmland, conducting surveys, managing details of crops and harvests, overseeing farming and public works, and assessing taxes owed to the pharaoh. First appointed before 119BC, he sought reappointment in 119BC with promises of payments of grain and land cultivation, supported in part by Dorion. His work was made harder by post-civil-war unrest, when farmers fled, officials demanded harsh tolls, inflation raised prices, tax income fell, and several scribes went on strike. On December 7, 118 BC, Menches and three others were arrested for allegedly trying to poison a man named Haryotes. They were acquitted on December 9, but Menches later worried about retaliation and asked the royal family for protection in May 117 BC. In 114 BC he reported a strike by farmers working royal land, and later he received state land through a military-style land distribution system, possibly as part of a policy to expand cultivation. From 111 BC he worked as village scribe alongside Petesouchos, who took over after Menches in 110 BC.