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Among the Syriac sources for the study of the Roman Near East, parchments and papyri occupy a prominent position. While only few instances survive from the period covered by the present volume, it should be emphasized that these documents are only a small remnant of the lively scribal and legal traditions of Edessa and Osrhoene (ssss1 and ssss1). In addition to these documents, a glimpse of the administrative and scribal activities in the kingdom of Edessa during the third century derives from a historiographical source, the Chronicle of Edessa, a composite annalistic compilation that took its current form during the sixth century but that includes earlier material (more on this below). The text makes reference to the official “scribes,” or perhaps “clerks of Edessa” (3.12: sōprē d-ʼūrhōy), and to “prefects (or commissioners) of the city” (šarrıĪrē da-mdıĪtō), who were in charge of the official archive of Edessa (ʼarkeyōn d-ʼūrhōy from the Greek archeion; 3.13–16); the recent discovery of the tomb of a scribe, Gadya, demonstrates the wealth that qualified administrative personnel could own (Önal 2017: 132–134). The royal archive of Edessa was still functioning in 243 CE (as attested by P. Dura 28) and was also known to Eusebius of Caesarea (Hist. eccl. 1.13.5 and 10; Segal 1970: 20–21); it contained not only private documents such as the copy of a Syriac deed of sale found in Dura-Europos (P. Dura 28), but, arguably, also annalistic records of the Abgarid dynasty, later used in the compilation of the Chronicle of Edessa. The surviving documents, all of which postdate Caracalla’s Constitutio Antoniniana of 212 CE, attest to the intersections of Roman law and local legal traditions; but they also offer evidence of the use of Syriac and Roman proper names within legal documents in relation to each individual’s social status: perhaps unexpectedly, high-ranking individuals and public officials chose to bear Semitic names in the documents, while low-ranking officials, scribes, and private individuals from local contexts and without office opted for Roman names, ultimately revealing the complexities of cultural divisions running through Edessene society (Sommer 2018: 259–271).