Amongst the hundreds of petitions from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt preserved on papyrus are some dozens that ask for the registration (katachorismos) of the petition itself. These requests raise the question of just how the mere registration of a complaint was supposed to help petitioners to enforce their legal rights and resolve the disputes in which they were embroiled.

            This paper argues that the answers to this question suggested in the early years of juristic papyrology (and followed ever since) are no longer tenable, thanks to the publication of new evidence. It is unlikely that these petitions were attempts to prevent actions from being barred thanks to the expiry of limitation periods (pace Mitt.Grund. 33 f.; cf. P.Oxy. LIX p. 95): they were quite often sent within days of the wrong, but the law gave litigants several years in which to bring claims (cf. P.Flor. I 61). We should also reject the suggestion that the registration of a petition would prompt the authorities to verify the facts of the case (pace Scherer, P.Fouad, p. 73): the petitions do not expressly say this, and the many other petitions contain requests for official investigations without any suggestion that registration was a necessary precondition to this. 

            Instead, this paper suggests that the key to the problem lies in the express request in some of these texts that the petition be registered in order to bear witness to the facts alleged by the petitioner (e.g., P.Fouad 29; P.Ryl. II 116; PSI III 249). There was a perception in Egyptian legal culture that litigants who brought allegations to official notice quickly were more credible (e.g., P.Oxy. II 237 viii.7-18). Registration petitions should therefore be seen as responding to this perception: if a lawsuit was likely to be delayed, parties tried to protect their versions of events by promptly registering a petition. Such texts therefore illuminate one interesting aspect of attitudes to truth and evidence in this particular legal culture.