This book is the first detailed study of a village in the Roman Empire, Tebtunis, in Egypt, in the first century AD. It is based on the evidence of the archive of the local notarial office (grapheion), which was run by a man named Kronion for most of the mid-first century. The archive as a whole, unparallelled in antiquity, includes over 200 documents written on papyrus and attests to a wide range of transactions made by the villagers over well-defined periods of time, in particular the years AD 42 and 45–7 during the reign of the emperor Claudius. This evidence gives us a unique insight into various aspects of village life, such as the level of participation in the written contractual economy; the socio-economic stratification of the village, including the position of women, slaves, and priests, and the role of the elite; the functions of associations; the types and importance of agriculture and non-agricultural activities. This book argues for a highly diversified village economy, wide involvement in written transactions among all strata of the population, and a rural society that generally lived above subsistence level. It provides a model of village society that can be used for understanding the large majority of the population within the Roman empire who lived outside cities in the Mediterranean, particularly in the other eastern and more Hellenized provinces.