Footnote 3 – Floating in the Desert

These papyri are the archives of Zeno, a Greek from Anatolia who settled in Egypt in the mid-third century B.C.E. and worked under the third Ptolemaic finance minister Apollonius. Found in 1915 at the site of Hellenistic Philadelphia, east of the Fayum, the papyri are an important source of information about the economy, administration, law and life of Ptolemaic Egypt. The papyri also provide a report on the visit Zeno made to Palestine, in which he mentions the Tobiads as a military colony in Transjordan.