פרופ' אורי יפתח

Professor Uri Yiftach is a full professor in the Department of Classical Studies at Tel Aviv University, where he teaches Latin and Greekt. His research encompasses the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman world, with particular focus on legal history, formulaic history, the history of the ancient economy, Greek language, and the edition and interpretation of documentary papyri. He founded two collaborative research groups – Legal Documents in Ancient Society (2007) and elenchus documentorum (2018) – both aimed at advancing the understanding of ancient documentary texts and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration.

Professor Yiftach’s recent monograph, The Taxonomy of the Legal Document (RIDA Hors-série, Presses universitaires de Liège, 2025), offers a comprehensive analysis of the language of Greek legal texts on papyrus from Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine Egypt Grounded in the Synallagma digital corpus—initially developed with support from the Israel Science Foundation and now hosted at the University of Münster—the study provides a clause-by-clause typology of 281 contract formulations spanning the early Hellenistic to the late Byzantine period. This philological, quantitative, and comparative approach examines each clause’s syntactic form, legal function, and diachronic development, aiming to uncover the linguistic mechanisms by which ancient scribes encoded rights, duties, and transfers of ownershipe. This innovative work contributes significantly to legal history and historical linguistics, laying an empirical foundation for the study of formulaic writing in antiquitye. Professor Yiftach’s research agenda continues to expand, as he explores semantic aspects of documentary texts in additional ancient sources to further broaden the scope of formulaic studies.

Name:          Uri          Yiftach            Ph.D. Phil

                   (first)          (last)         (Acad. degree)

No. ID Card    022956759

Faculty: Humanities, Tel Aviv University: Classical Studies, Greece and Rome 

Home Address: 22 Refidim St., 69982 Tel Aviv 

Cellular phone no.      9722-7239048                         e-mail: uiftach@tauex.tau.ac.il

Date and place of birth: September 12, 1967, Israel

ZAHAL (Israeli) Military Service: enlisted February 6, 1986. Discharged: February 1, 1989

Marital Status: married          No. of children: 3

1992                       Bachelor of Arts Tel Aviv University, Department of the Classics and Department of History

2001                       Ph.D. (direct track): Tel Aviv University, Department of History Topic of dissertation: Marriage and Marital Arrangements. A History of the Greek Marriage Document in Egypt. 4th Century BCE—4th Century CE.

                               Supervisors: Professors Ze’ev Rubin and Ranon Katzoff

Further Studies:

2000–2001             Post-Doctoral Fellow at Columbia University Department of the Classics. Host: Professor Roger S. Bagnall

2001–2002             Golda Meir Fellow at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Department of the Classics. Host: Professor Hannah M. Cotton

ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

1994–1998             Research Associate, Corpus of Jewish Inscriptions of the Near East ( Professor  Jonathan Price, Tel Aviv University)

1996–1997             Research Associate, Greek Papyri from the Judean Desert (Professor  Ranon Katzoff, Bar-Ilan University)

1997                       Co-Lecturer: Law and Family in Greco-Roman Egypt, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich

1999                       Teacher, part-time: Achva Academic College, Beer Tuvia, Israel

2001–2002             Teacher, part–time: Achva Academic College, Beer Tuvia, Israel

2001–2003             Research Associate, Corpus Inscriptionum Judaeae/Palaestinae (Professor Hannah M. Cotton, Hebrew University; Professor Benjamin Isaac, Tel Aviv University)

2002                       Teacher, part-time: Tel Aviv Academic College

2002–2003             Research Associate, Greek Papyri from the Judean Desert (Professor Ranon Katzoff, Bar-Ilan University)

2002–2003             Research Associate, Continuity and Change in the Formulary of Legal Documents in the Greek East (Avshalom Laniado, Tel Aviv University)

2003–2005             Lecturer in Classics and Law, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

2005–2010             Lecturer in Classics, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

2010–2014             Senior Lecturer in Classics with tenure, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

2013–2014             Head of the Department of Classics, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

2014–                     Associate Professor, Department of Classical Studies, Tel Aviv University

2022–                     Head of the Department of Classical Studies, Tel Aviv University

2023-                     Full Professor, Department of Classical Studies, Tel Aviv University

Greek Papyrology, Law. Greek Language, Ptolemaic and Roman Administration, Comparative Law, Law of Contract, Digital Humanities.

Monographs:

U. Yiftach-Firanko, Marriage and Marital Arrangements. A History of the Greek Marriage Document in Egypt. 4th Century BCE—4th Century CE, Münchener Beiträge zur Papyrusforschung und antiken Rechtsgeschichte 93 (Munich 2003), 387 pp.

U. Yiftach, The Taxonomy of Legal Documents. An Account of the Language and Terminology of Clauses in Greek Legal Documents From Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine Egypt, RIDA Hors série 1 (Liège 2025) https://doi.org/10.25518/978-2-87562-473-4 

REFEREED ARTICLES IN BOOKS

U. Yiftach-Firanko, “Judean Desert Marriage Documents and Ekdosis in the Greek Law of the Roman Period,” in R. Katzoff, D. Schaps (eds.), Law in the Documents of the Judean Desert (Leiden–Boston 2005), 67–84.

EDITING

If you want these sections re-sorted strictly reverse-chronologically, say so and I’ll reshuffle without touching the phrasing.