Question

In their 1896 excavation of the waste mounds at Oxyrhynchus, papyrologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt documented extensive Ptolemaic and Roman administrative records. Contrary to prevailing nineteenth-century assumptions that classical administrative texts were preserved exclusively in damp monastic archives or formal tombs, Grenfell and Hunt observed that the hyper-arid climatic conditions of Upper Egypt permitted the survival of discarded everyday ephemera in unsealed rubbish heaps. Among these documents, land-survey registers from the reign of Ptolemy VIII revealed that local tenant farmers were not subjected to uniform annual grain assessments as previously posited by historian Karl Beloch. Instead, the registers explicitly note that tax rates fluctuated annually based on flood-height measurements recorded at localized nilometers along the Nile tributaries. Furthermore, while imperial decrees mandated grain delivery to state-controlled granaries in Alexandria, private transportation receipts contained within the same stratographical layer indicate that regional river-barge guilds were contracted by individual landholders to fulfill these quotas, rather than relying on state-owned transport vessels.

Based on the passage, which of the following statements regarding Ptolemaic administration and grain transport is explicitly supported by Grenfell and Hunt's findings? Select all that apply.