Two types of bilingual records of legal proceedings are known from late antique Egypt: a) detailed records of proceedings including lawyers’ speeches, witness statements and examination by the judge; b) concise records of the so-called ‘libellus procedure’, i.e. court cases that were handled bureaucratically without a hearing. These however do not constitute two different forms of legal procedure but merely represent different phases of the same legal process: whereas libellus papyri document the initium, that is, the commencement of the legal action, detailed reports record the cognitio, i.e. the actual judicial proceedings. The so-called ‘libellus procedure’ was modelled on the processing of petitions through subscriptio and was introduced in the first half of the 4th century.