What did an ancient Roman certificate of land ownership look like; or, what did it consist of?
score:14
The ancient Romans did not use deeds, they used a registration system. The document cited by Semaphore is not a deed, it is a conveyance (everybody now run to the Wikipedia and find out what a conveyance is).
Roman land was surveyed and divided by stone markers called limites. In some places the land was divided into regular squares called centuriae. In those cases the owner of each square was recorded. Other times, the land was in irregular bounds, in which case it was individually recorded. There were two main types of records: the subseciva (land owned by the empire/government) and beneficia (land owned by individuals). In well-established places these lists were recorded on bronze plaques, and in more temporary situations they were recorded on wood or other less permanent materials.
The example you give would never happen because the ownership of land and its bounds were recorded, so the taxpayer would not have needed to prove anything.
The most common source of problems concerning land ownership in ancient Roman involved the culinae, which were public commons located on the outskirts of towns in the margins between the town and regularly owned farmland. This land was supposed to be for the use of the poor in the town, but in many cases adjoining farmers appropriated this land unjustly, leading to disputes of various kinds.
There is an ancient document called the Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum which describes Roman surveying and recording practices in detail.
Upvote:33
Ancient Rome had land deeds and registrations. Most of it has long since been lost, but there are still plenty of examples. Note that Roman rule lasted a long time and stretched across three continents; unsurprisingly, the exact details of the system in place differed across time and space.
For example, there is a land deed found among the papyri excavated at Nessana, in the Eastern Roman Empire. Probably due to its location, it was written in Greek rather than Latin. The document notified the Land Office that the brothers Abraham and Abu-Zunayn were transferring a piece of ancestral land to a comrade, Thomas. The boundaries of the property were also spelt out.
(Source: Kraemer, Caspar J. Excavations at Nessana, Volume 3: Non-literary Papyri. Princeton University Press, 1958. Page 77-78.)
To get a sense of what such deeds contain, here is the translated version:
(Source: Kraemer, Caspar J. Excavations at Nessana, Volume 3: Non-literary Papyri. Princeton University Press, 1958. Page 79.)
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