In the context of an Australian Research Council project on scribal practice on Duplicate documents*, a team of researchers at Macquarie University have been working on detecting the modes and methods by which documents were copied in both public and private settings in Roman Egypt. In a paper delivered to the Geneva congress of papyrology, Rachel-Yuen Collingridge identified scribal features by which we might detect which copy was made first when this is not known. In this paper, I approach the problem from the opposite direction, analyzing duplicate documents in which it is known which copy is the original, to assess the manner in which the copy was produced, and what we can learn from that about the process of duplication of documents in Roman Egypt.

‘Knowledge Transfer and Administrative Professionalism in a Pre-Typographic Society: Observing the Scribe at work in Roman and Early Islamic Egypt’, Australian Research Council Project Discovery Project DP120103738.