Greek papyrological evidence from the Palestine area is scarce; thus, the main source material for the sixth century ce consists of only two papyrus dossiers: one from Petra and the other from Nessana. The recent publication of the Petra papyri provides some long-awaited data on the onomastics of slaves and their existence in households of the elite and in the Christian community of Petra. The more abundant papyrological corpus from Egypt does not give a clear image of slaves this late in time. This article provides the first detailed and contextualized study on the evidence for slaveholding in the Greek documentary papyrological material of the Palestine area in the sixth century. In the first section, I give a brief overview of both the Nessana and Petra dossiers. In the second part, I review the attestations in the papyrus texts from these dossiers as well as the terms used for possible slaves in each case.

This chapter explores the concept of ‘entangled legalities’ in the context of pre-modern and (post-)modern localised legal orders: regional, imperial, national, international, transnational and postnational. The first section explores the juridification of the international legal sphere; it contrasts private international law approaches with postnational law approaches, exploring the ways in which the recent postnational shift from hierarchical to heterarchical governance structures in fact leads us back to fundamental questions first posed by (Classical) Roman law. The second section focuses on the striking predominance of ‘strong’ legal norms in current analyses of transnational and postnational legal entanglements. The third section, in contrast, argues for a shift in scholarly emphasis away from ‘strong’ legal norms towards a more explicit focus on the importance of strategic legal argumentation in the constructing localised legalities, via a case study of the multiple juris(dictional)-generative practices revealed in the record of a specific, sixth-century, Roman (Byzantine) dispute settlement: P. Petra IV.39.