Heroninos Archive

Grenfell and Hunt

Bernard Grenfell		Arthur Hunt

The Heroninos Archive is a collection of around a thousand papyrus documents, dating to the third century AD. They were found at the very end of the 19th century at Kasr El Harit (the site of ancient Theadelphia [de]), in the Faiyum area of Egypt by Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt. The archive is named after Heroninos, the phrontistes (Koine Greek: manager) of the estate whose records make up a large part of the collection.

As well as being the largest single collection of papyri from Roman Egypt, it is also significant for the in-depth picture it gives of the running of a Roman estate. To date, less than half of the documents in the archive have been published. Scholars believe that when it is all published, it will represent "one of the largest coherent groups of documents from the Roman Empire."^[1]