Itzhak Fikhman was what we in the trade call "a documentary papyrologist". A weak eye from an early age impeded Fikhman from editing papyri himself, but he was a careful and critical reader of the editions of others, and was able, owing to his inexhaustible knowledge of the historical context, to revise and offer numerous corrections to a large variety of published texts. Fikhman's vast erudition and inti- mate familiarity with literary, legal, and epigraphic sources allowed him to integrate them al into his studies of documentary papyrology. Fikhman's research had focused on Late Antiquity, roughly between the late third and the seventh centuries CE, and on two geographic settings in particular: the Hermopolite and the Oxyrhynchite nomes. Oxyrhynchos was also the subject of a monograph he published in Russian in 1976. Although Fikhman occasionally published on other topics as well, he was first and foremost a social historian, whose studies focused on classes, social groups and personal status. Fikhman studied associations in the Roman and Byzantine pe- riods and the professionalization and specialization of craftsmanship, as illustra- ted by the increasing spectrum of terms used for the designation ofartisans in the Byzantine period. Fikhman also studied the decline and disappearance of slavery in Late Antique Oxyrhynchos, and the rise, within the same social and geographic setting, of other, occasionally less formal forms of dependency.