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The multitude of incidental day-to-day written matter on potsherds and papyrus, preserved by climatological quirks in Egypt, affords insights into the normal living patterns of ordinary people during the pharaonic, the Hellenistic (Ptolemaic), and the Roman periods. More formal records of similar provenance may be described as legal in the widest sense, comprising such objects as land deeds, cadastral inventories (tax surveys), wills, adoption decrees, and trial transcripts. Thus many technicalities of landholding in the Nile Delta during certain ancient periods survive, unwarranted by any normal expectancies of epigraphic preservation elsewhere; only the happenstance of the Creto-Mycenaean records (see below ...(100 of 12223 words)