colonization and land distribution, taxation, senatorial and magisterial
business, the archiving of laws, the management of grain distributions,
the movement of goods, religious archives, personal documentation, and
the regulation of individual mobility. The majority of contributions con-
cerned either the activities of the state or private activities in which the
state had a special interest.
One thing that emerged clearly was a more vivid than ever picture of
Rome’s dependence on writing to articulate the enormously complex
operations on which its government and economy relied. Moving grain
from Egypt to Rome, for example, involved paperwork transactions at the
Egyptian granaries where thesitologoiissued receipts to suppliers, then a
new set of receipts issued by captains of the transport vessels, lists of grain
dispersed, inscribed seals on shipments, written contracts between ship-
pers and the state, some form of harbor control in Portus, documents to
manage the Roman warehouses.
42
None of this includes the complex
private paperwork used by great Egyptian estates to keep track of local
spending on casual labor, materials and transport, and revenue from rental
and sale, nor the equally complex paperwork of thefrumentationesat
Rome through which a good deal of state grain found its way to the
consumer.^43 Equally the process of colonization involved not just the
original law but also the compilation of lists of volunteers, lists of prop-
erties assigned, cadastral documents providing an official map of the
territory in question, additional books, notes andcommentarii—appar-
ently formal annotations explaining the assignment. Many of these
would potentially be of use in any subsequent legal dispute, and some
would be important for the census.^44 Examples of this kind could
be multiplied.
It is clear not only that great quantities of texts were produced by
almost every major project in which the state was involved, but also that
creating documentation was commonly seen as an essential part of any
such operation. A ‘‘documentary mentality’’ pervaded Roman action of
this kind, so that when some new scheme was developed—the Gracchan
grain distributions, for example—it was assumed by all that this would
generate records. Again, this sort of procedure is so familiar to us that we
forget that it is alien to many societies. It is all the more surprising, then,
that another of the clear conclusions of the project was that although
record making was ubiquitous, hardly any efforts were made to store
information in forms in which it could be conveniently recovered.
45
Roman archives were haphazard. Anecdotes from the age of Cicero
- Rickman 1998.
- On the use of writing on the Egyptian estates see Rathbone 1991, 331 87. On the
paperwork associated with grain distributions see Virlouvet 1995. - Moatti 1993.
- Moatti 1993, 99; cf. Culham 1989.
62 Situating Literacies