Joseph G. Manning
Professor of Classics & History
Senior Research Scholar, Yale Law School
Office: 311 Phelps Hall
Phone: (203) 432-0989
Fax: (203) 432-1079
Email: joseph.manning@yale.edu
Joe Manning took his BA in Architectural History from the Ohio State University, and his A.M and Ph.D. from the Oriental Institute in the University of Chicago. His research has focused on Hellenistic history and the economic and legal history of the Ptolemaic period. His first work centered on a well known bilingual family archive of legal documents from third century BC Edfu, in the south of Egypt. In 2003, Land and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt: The Structure of Land Tenure appeared from Cambridge University Press. This book examined land tenure in the broad context of socio-economic change and continuity after the Ptolemaic takeover of Egypt. His new monograph, The Last Pharaohs: Legitimacy, Authority and State Power Under the Ptolemies builds on Land and power in Ptolemaic Egypt and is the first sustained analysis of how the Ptolemaic kings reformed the Egyptian state toward their own ends. The book continues his approach in understanding Ptolemaic Egypt within the long-term of Egyptian history, and from the point of view of pre-modern, Asian processes of state centralization.
Among other projects currently underway, Manning is finishing up the editing of Law and Society in Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine Egypt with Uri Yiftach (Jerusalem)and James G. Keenan (Loyola University of Chicago) for Cambridge University Press.
Before coming to Yale, Manning taught at Princeton and Stanford Universities.
