This volume collects a set of papers which arose from work on three related research projects: the Australian Research Council Discovery Project ‘Knowledge transfer and administrative professionalism in a pre-typographic society: observing the scribe at work in Roman and early Islamic Egypt’ (DP120103738), based at Macquarie University and worked on by Choat, Cromwell, and YuenCollingridge; Ast and Lougovaya’s subprojects within the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’s Sonderforschungsbereich 933, ‘Materiale Textkulturen: Materialität und Präsenz des Geschriebenen in non-typographischen Gesellschaften’, based at the University of Heidelberg; and Cromwell’s Macquarie University Research Fellowship project, ‘Scribal Control in Early Islamic Egypt: Integration and Effect of the Administration of a New Regime’.