New light on Roman census papyri through semi-automated record linkage

The census documents from Roman Egypt form the best documentary source of demographic information for the Roman Empire. Earlier collections (Bagnall and Frier 2006; Bagnall, Frier, and Rutherford 1997) have shown that some individuals and households appear more than once within this body of evidence. This article demonstrates how semi-automated record linkage provides an efficient and systematic way of producing linkages between early historical documentary sources that are fragmentary. The process yielded more linkages with generally high probability values than previously employed linkage-by-hand methods. As the added examples show, semi-automated record linkage also proved to be a useful method to fill gaps in papyri by transferring information from one record to the other. As such, it provides new opportunities for papyrologists and epigraphers working with fragmented materials pertaining to the ancient Greco-Roman world.