Cession of cleruchic land : from procedure to format

Cleruchic land was attributed by the Ptolemies to their soldiers to provide them with a living. In the early Roman period, this land category gradually took the appearance of private property, known as catoecic land. On the formal side, however, catoecic land retained some elements of the ancient procedure devised for its cession within a military context. A survey of the procedure, published in a previous article, combined with an examination of the format in a string of documents from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, makes it possible to explain also the atypical format of a group of documents related to this procedure in the late second and early third century CE: contrary to the usual practice in this period, several such documents were written transuersa charta, with the writing across the fibres.