An Oasis City 9781479818716

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An Oasis City

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An Oasis City Roger S. Bagnall Nicola Aravecchia Raffaella Cribiore Paola Davoli Olaf E. Kaper Susanna McFadden

INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF THE ANCIENT WORLD NYU PRESS NEW YORK 2015

© 2015 Institute for the Study of the Ancient World NYU Press

ISBN 978-1-4798-8922-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bagnall, Roger S. An oasis city / Roger S. Bagnall, Nicola Aravecchia, Raffaella Cribiore, Paola Davoli, Olaf E. Kaper, Susanna McFadden. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4798-8922-8 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4798-1871-6 (e-book)— ISBN 978-1-4798-6031-9 (e-book) 1. Amheida Site (Egypt) 2. Excavations (Archaeology)—Egypt—Amheida Site. 3. Egypt—Antiquities, Roman. I. Title. DT73.A53B34 2015 932’.2—dc23 2015036944

Design by Andrew Reinhard

Printed in the United States

Contents Figures

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Contributors

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Chronological Table

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Preface Introduction Roger S. Bagnall and Olaf E. Kaper 1 Amheida in Its Surroundings

The natural landscape and its evolution Paola Davoli



The sacred landscape Olaf E. Kaper



The economic landscape Roger S. Bagnall

2 Amheida before the Romans

Early remains on the temple hill Paola Davoli



Textual and decorative evidence for the New Kingdom and the Third Intermediate Period Olaf E. Kaper



The temples of the Late Period Olaf E. Kaper



A sacred necropolis Paola Davoli

3 The Urban Landscape during the Roman Period

The city plan of Roman and late Roman Trimithis Paola Davoli



The baths of Trimithis Paola Davoli



Two houses Paola Davoli, Roger S. Bagnall

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4 Egyptian Religion at Trimithis during the Roman Period

The temple Paola Davoli, Olaf E. Kaper



Funerary life: the pyramids Olaf E. Kaper

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Onomastics Roger S. Bagnall 5 Christianity at Trimithis and in the Dakhla Oasis

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The church of Trimithis Nicola Aravecchia



Other evidence of Christianity at Amheida Roger S. Bagnall and Raffaella Cribiore



Other churches in Dakhla: Kellis, ‘Ain el-Gedida, Deir Abu Matta, Deir el-Molouk, ‘Ain es-Sabil Nicola Aravecchia

6 Economy and Society in the Roman Oasis

The oasis economy Roger S. Bagnall



A rural settlement in the oasis system Nicola Aravecchia



Government and military Roger S. Bagnall



Oasis society Roger S. Bagnall

7 Trimithis in the Culture of the Eastern Roman Empire

Literary culture and education in the Dakhla Oasis Raffaella Cribiore



Amheida’s wall paintings Susanna McFadden



The evidence of Greek names Roger S. Bagnall

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Abbreviations

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Bibliography

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Index

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Figures 1. Egypt showing the location of the Dakhla Oasis. 2. The Dakhla and Kharga Oases. 3. Left, the area of Amheida in 1967; right, the same area today. 4. The scarp bordering the oasis on the north. 5. Plan of Amheida. 6. Satellite view of the Amheida and El-Qasr area (2000) (Base image from Ikonos). 7. View of Amheida amid cultivation. 8. Burials cut by a water channel. 9. Preserved barrel vaults. 10. A sherd-covered site surface. 11. A Mut-formation mound of reddish shale. 12. A large spring mound south of Amheida. 13. Standing walls on the slope of the temple hill. 14. The Greater Dakhla Stela (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; photo O. E. Kaper). 15. The stela of Seth from Amheida. 16. Inside the temenos wall at Deir el-Hagar (photo O. E. Kaper). 17. Visitors’ graffiti at Deir el-Hagar (photo O. E. Kaper). 18. Plan of the temple at Deir el-Hagar (James Knudstad/Dakhleh Oasis Project). 19. A stibadium (banqueting bench) inside the temenos at Deir el-Hagar (photo O. E. Kaper). 20. A relief at Deir el-Hagar depicting Thoth and Nehmet-Away (photo O. E. Kaper). 21. A relief at Deir el-Hagar from the reign of Titus, portraying Amun-Re, Khonsu and Mut (photo O. E. Kaper). 22. A pigeon tower northwest of Amheida, exterior view. vii

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23. A pigeon tower east of Kellis, interior view. 24. Plan of Amheida showing the reconstructed temple precinct. 25. View of the surviving part of the temenos wall. 26. A pit on the temple hill showing marks from digging. 27. Part of a wall collapsed into a pit. 28. Double bread molds reused as revetment on the temple hill. 29. A steatite cylinder seal of the Early Dynastic Period, with impression. 30. Ostrakon with Kemyt text. 31. Stela showing Seti II making offerings to Thoth and Horus. 32. Amheida hieratic stela of the 23rd Dynasty. 33. A doorway from the Late Period temple, reused at El-Qasr (photo O. E. Kaper, 1990). 34. A fragment of a temple decoration with the Horus name of Nekau II. 35. The arm of Thoth holding a staff, from the temple of Amasis, showing blue coloring. 36. The head of Amun in a relief from the temple of Amasis. 37. A stone block showing the titulary of Petubastis IV. 38. Empty cartouches of Darius I. 39. A baboon in raised relief from the temple of Darius. 40. A representation of Khepri from the entrance doorway of the temple of Darius (photo Christopher Kleihege). 41. Pottery bird coffins shown in context. 42. Miniature pottery vessels from the sacred animal necropolis. 43. Bronze Osiris statuettes. 44. An Osiris figurine of unfired clay. 45. Plan of Amheida. 46. Plan of Area 11. 47. Chinking sherds used in the walls. 48. Area 11. 49. Tetradrachms from the hoard of billon coins found in the temple area (photos Thomas Faucher). 50. A view of the necropolis. 51. Panoramic view of the center of Trimithis. 52. The step dividing the habitations from the south necropolis. 53. Detailed plan of the habitation area. 54. Plan of Area 1. 55. Central north–south street. 56. Reconstruction of the partly covered Trimithis Street 3 (S. Prell). 57. A hall with two pillars.

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58. A stairway in the house of Serenos (B1). 59. Pottery kilns in Area 1. 60. A tomb in tower form, north of Trimithis (before restoration). 61. Plan of the Roman baths. 62. Central pillared hall and bathing area of the Late Roman baths (B6). 63. Plan of the final form of the baths (B6). 64. The latrine in the baths. 65. Room 24. 66. The laconicum. 67. A column base from the first phase of the baths. 68. Plan of the house of Serenos (B1). 69. The stibadium outside the house of Serenos. 70. A chicken coop in the north extension of Serenos’ house. 71. Feed troughs in the north extension of Serenos’ house. 72. House B1, Room 15 and its reconstruction with a suspended wooden floor (B. Bazzani). 73. House B1, storage bins in Room 13. 74. House B1, Room 2 (replica 2010). 75. Ring from the house of Serenos. 76. House B1, Room 1. 77. House B1, Room 4. 78. Lamps from the treasure found below the floor of Room 4. 79. House B1, a view of Room 6 (replica 2010). 80. An aerial view of House B2. 81. Plan of House B2. 82. House B2, an unexplained feature in kitchen and the oven. 83. House B2, storage space under the floor of Room 6. 84. A clay tablet inscribed with an account of doum fruits, from House B2. 85. Plan of the temenos. 86. Two reused temple blocks in el-Qasr (photo O. E. Kaper). 87. Two stone blocks with baboon decoration, still together despite reuse and demolition (photo O. E. Kaper). 88. Goddesses in the sanctuary of Domitian. 89. A pedestal fragment (standing on its right side) showing two Roman emperors as pharaohs holding up the sky. 90. Amheida Pyramid before restoration. 91. The same pyramid after restoration (photo Christoher Kleihege). 92. A reconstructed pyramid at Deir el-Medina (photo O. E. Kaper). 93. Amheida: The church (B7) before excavation (view to the south).

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94. Plan of church B7 at Amheida. 95. A passageway leading to church B7 (view to the east). 96. Room 1 of the church showing a line of colonnades (view to the southeast). 97. The stepped platform in Room 1 of the church (view to the southeast). 98. A test trench dug along the north aisle of the church (view to the east). 99. Church (B7), large fragments of painted plaster from the ceiling. 100. The funerary crypt under the north pastophorion of the church (view to the southeast). 101. A graffito with an invocation of Ammon (infrared photo). 102. An ostrakon bearing an account headed “the father” (or “our father”) (O.Trim. 2.819). 103. Plan of the West Church complex at Kellis (after Bowen 2002, 76, fig. 8). 104. Kellis, plan of the East Churches complex (after Bowen 2002, 66, fig. 2). 105. Plan of the church at ‘Ain el-Gedida. 106. ‘Ain el-Gedida, the church and the assembly hall (view to the west). 107. The podium inside the church at ‘Ain el-Gedida, with a bricked-in wall behind it (view to the northwest). 108. Deir Abu Matta, external walls of the church (view to the west). 109. Deir el-Molouk, church plan (after Grossmann 2002, plan 181). 110. An ostrakon used as a tag in a jar stopper. 111. ‘Ain el-Gedida, Google site view (to the northwest) with archaeological plan superimposed. 112. Site map of ‘Ain el-Gedida. 113. ‘Ain el-Gedida, southern half of the main mound (view to the northeast). 114. Storerooms in the southern half of the main mound at ‘Ain el-Gedida (view to the northwest). 115. A kitchen in the southern half of the main hill (view to the east). 116. Plan of the main hill at ‘Ain el-Gedida. 117. An excavated area to the south of the church complex (aerial view to the southwest). 118. ‘Ain el-Gedida, remains of the temple/ceramic workshop (view to the north). 119. Classrooms at Kom el-Dikka, Alexandria. 120. A wall showing a poetic dipinto in a schoolroom (Room 15) at Amheida. 121. Benches in Room 15. 122. Room 15, view from above. 123. Detail of the dipinto with lectional signs. 124. Homeric passage on a wall in Room 19. 125. A passage about an ignorant king from Room 19.

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126. A line from Euripides on a wall in House B1, Room 13. 127. Traces of painted plaster in an unexcavated room at Amheida. 128. The house of Serenos, Room 1, north wall and northeast corner. 129. Geometric design from Room 11. 130. Geometric design from Room 14. 131. West wall of Room 1 and doorway into Room 14, illustrating thickness of painted plaster attached to mud-brick masonry. 132. Replica of the house of Serenos, showing geometric registers. 133. The dome in the replica of the house of Serenos. 134. The replica house, figural motifs. 135. Detail of geometric designs from Room 1’s northeast corner. 136. The north wall of Room 1 in 1979, showing Odysseus and Eurykleia (photo Peter Sheldrick). 137. The east wall, depicting the adultery of Aphrodite and Ares. 138. A reconstructed vignette from Room 1, east wall, showing Zeus as a bull and Europa. 139. A fragment from the west wall of Room 1 depicting (left) the haunches of several rearing horses, and (right) a woman brandishing a sword at an enthroned figure. 140. Room 1, east wall, detail of Polis. 141. Room 1, west wall, banquet scene. 142. A large plaster fragment in situ portraying Orpheus taming the animals. 143. The tomb of Petosiris at El-Muzawwaqa. 144. Archival photograph of Karanis Excavations, House B50, Heron on left, Isis nursing Harpocrates, KM 5.2159. Photo courtesy Kelsey Museum, University of Michigan. Front cover: Detail, wall painting, House of Serenos (B1) (photo Bruno Bazzani). Back cover: Trimithis (photo Bruno Bazzani).

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Contributors Roger S. Bagnall is Professor of Ancient History and Leon Levy Director at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, and director of the Amheida excavations. His recent books include Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East and (as co-editor) the Encyclopedia of Ancient History. Nicola Aravecchia is Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, and field director of the ‘Ain el-Gedida archaeological mission as well as Deputy Field Director of the Amheida excavations, where he leads work on the church. His final report on the archaeological excavations at ‘Ain el-Gedida is forthcoming. Raffaella Cribiore is Professor of Classics at New York University. She is a specialist in ancient education, a papyrologist (mostly literary), and is also very interested in Greek rhetoric, especially in late antiquity. She has published five books: Writing: Teachers and Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt (Atlanta, 1996); Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton 2001); Women’s Letters in Ancient Egypt: 300 BC–AD 800 (Ann Arbor 2006, coauthored with R. S. Bagnall); The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch (Princeton 2007); Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality and Religion in the Fourth Century (Cornell 2013). Another book, Between City and School: Selected Orations of Libanius is forthcoming as part of Translated Texts for Historians. Paola Davoli is Associate Professor of Egyptology at the University of the Salento, Lecce, and archaeological director of Amheida excavations. She has more than 20 years of field experience in archaeology in Egypt, and she is currently the co-director of Soknopaiou Nesos Project (Fayyum). Olaf E. Kaper is Professor of Egyptology at Leiden University and Adjunct Research Fellow at Monash University, Melbourne. He is senior investigator of the Dakhleh Oasis Project, directed by A. J. Mills, since 1988, and Associate Director for Egyptology of the excavations at Amheida since 2004. Susanna McFadden is Assistant Professor of Art History at Fordham University. Her most recent publications include an article on late antique wall paintings in Rome in the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome (vol. 58), and a book (as co-editor) on the late Roman wall paintings in Luxor Temple entitled, Art of Empire: The Roman Frescoes and Imperial Cult Chamber in Luxor Temple.

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Chronological Chart* BCE Early Dynastic Period ca. 3000–2686 Old Kingdom ca. 2686–2160 ca. 2160–2055 First Intermediate Period Middle Kingdom ca. 2055–1650 Second Intermediate Period ca. 1650–1550 New Kingdom ca. 1550–1069 Dynasty 19 Seti II ca. 1200–1194 Ramesses IX ca. 1126–1108 Third Intermediate Period ca. 1069–664 Dynasty 21 Dynasty 22 Shoshenq I ca. 945–924 Shoshenq III ca. 825–773 Dynasty 23 Takeloth III ca. 800 Dynasty 25 Piye (Piy) ca. 747–716 Late Period 664–332 Dynasty 26 Psamtik I 664–610 Nekau II 610–595 Psamtik II 595–589 Apries 589–570 Amasis 570–526 Psamtik III 526–525 Dynasty 27 (Persians) Cambyses 525–522 Petubastis IV ca. 522–518 Darius I 522–486 Xerxes I 486–465 Alexander the Great 332–323 Ptolemaic Period 323–30 Roman Period 30 BCE–CE 641 *Dates follow I. Shaw, ed., The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. Oxford and New York 2000.

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Preface This book originated in an invitation from Christian Witschel to deliver a series of Margarete-Häcker Lectures in Heidelberg in 2010. These were subsequently published in German.1 I repeat here my thanks to those who made my stay in Heidelberg so pleasant and who helped to see the German edition through to publication: Joachim Friedrich Quack, Andrea Jördens, Alexander Puk, Rodney Ast, and Julia Lougovaya. Because the format of that volume restricted both its size and the amount of illustration, it was my intention from the beginning to produce a more extensive English version with richer illustration, and I am grateful to Franz Steiner Verlag for their willingness to permit this. The larger scale also made it important for the relevant sections to be written by the members of the Amheida team responsible for particular domains, and this has therefore become a six-author book. The authorship of particular sections is clearly indicated, and the pronoun “I” throughout is specific to the section authors, as are the views expressed by them individually. I am deeply grateful to all of them for their punctuality in producing their contributions and revising them. And especially I thank them, along with the other team members, for helping to build a lively intellectual community both during our field season and beyond. My parts of this book have all benefited from numerous conversations with all of them. Our excavations at Amheida are now a decade old. They have barely scratched the surface of a large and complex site with a long history, of which 1. Bagnall 2013.

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only some glimpses are visible so far. This book is thus in one sense being written far too early. But from another point of view, it is never too early to synthesize. The task is often put off too long, and sometimes never happens. As importantly, the work of synthesis helps frame questions for the continuing excavations and makes us confront issues we might have avoided. Because the book is being published electronically as well as in print form, it will be possible to update it regularly. The electronic version is extensively linked to the project’s database (www. amheida.com). We owe this database to the remarkable work of Bruno Bazzani, who has also served as our principal photographer. Except as noted, the project photographs in this book are almost entirely his work. The excavations at Amheida began as a project of Columbia University when I was a faculty member there, and I am grateful for the support that enabled the fieldwork to begin. Those university administrators who made the undertaking possible are thanked in the preface to Amheida I: Ostraka from Trimithis (O.Trim. 1). I am deeply indebted also to David W. McLaughlin, the provost of New York University, for his support since I came to NYU in 2007, and to the staff of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World for their help in many ways. Elizabeth Bulls, the project coordinator during almost all of the first ten years, made many contributions towards keeping it on track; Eliana Katsiaouni has supported the most recent seasons. Ashraf Barakat and Gaber Mahmoud Murad continue to be the mainstays of our operations in Dakhla each year; they have kept us on the road and out of ditches with great constancy and devotion. Our two press readers have made a number of helpful suggestions for improving the presentation. We owe a great debt to our copy-editor, Sue Philpott, for her work in turning the contributions of six authors into a more unified text and saving us from obscurity in many passages. In the process of mapping, Amheida has been artificially divided into Areas for convenience in reference, numbered from 1 to 11, frequently referred to in the course of the book. Streets are numbered and designated S1 and so on; buildings are also numbered, B1 being the house of Serenos, and so forth. Roger Bagnall

Introduction

Roger S. Bagnall and Olaf E. Kaper The subject of this book is an ancient city in a part of the Western Desert of Egypt that in those times was considered the western or “Inner” part of the Great Oasis and is today the Dakhla Oasis, administratively part of the New Valley Governorate (Figs. 1–2). This city was called Trimithis in the Hellenistic and Roman periods; today the site is called Amheida. It is the subject of a field project that I (Roger Bagnall) have directed during the past fourteen years, with eleven years of excavation to date. We owe almost all of our knowledge of Trimithis to archaeology and to documents discovered through excavation, both at the site itself and from the work of the Dakhleh Oasis Project at Kellis, the archaeological site of Ismant el-Kharab, since 1986.1 As recently as 1987, the location of Trimithis was still debated, although the correct identification had been suggested already in the nineteenth century; it was known then only from a few papyri and one late antique bureaucratic compilation.2 There were multiple reasons for deciding to begin a field project at Amheida. Among them was a sense, shared with some other papyrologists—and eloquently articulated by Claudio Gallazzi in 1992 at the Copenhagen congress of papyrology—that our generation might be the last to enjoy significant opportunities to find ancient texts written in ink on papyrus, pottery, and wood in Egypt. Here, settlement expansion and the rising ground-water levels that are the result of the High Dam agricultural development and population growth more 1. See http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/ancient-kellis/. 2. Wagner 1987: 190–192, wavering between Ismant el-Kharab and Amheida. Wagner’s book went to press before the Australian excavations at Ismant el-Kharab settled decisively that site’s identity as Kellis. Lepsius 1874 is the first to associate Trimithis with the temple of Deir el-Hagar, even though this link could not be proven at the time.

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Figure 1. Egypt showing the location of the Dakhla Oasis.

generally are rapidly destroying the dry conditions on the edges of the Nile valley and the Fayyum, as well as in the desert oases—conditions that preserved hundreds of thousands of papyri and ostraka until the twentieth century.3 Amheida itself, once largely surrounded by desert, is 3. Gallazzi 1994.

Introduction

Figure 2. The Dakhla and Kharga Oases.

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Figure 3. Left, the area of Amheida in 1967; right, the same area today.

increasingly hemmed in by new cultivation (Fig. 3). Another motive was a more general assessment that there were few sustained high-quality projects in the archaeology of Graeco-Roman Egypt, especially linking texts to their archaeological contexts, and that more would be beneficial to the development of a more archaeologically grounded history of this society;4 a third motive was to furnish Columbia University, where I was then teaching, with a means for teaching archaeological fieldwork methods to its students.5 The choice of site came more specifically from a combination of opportunity and my own research interests. Editing the wooden tablets of the Kellis Agricultural Account Book6 in the mid-1990s had brought me for the first time to the Dakhla Oasis. This region is located about 850 km by road from Cairo, and nearly 500 from the area of Luxor in the Nile valley; it is thus deep into the Western Desert. Like the other major oases of Egypt, Dakhla is a depression in the desert plateau, bounded by a high scarp on its north (Fig. 4). Amheida is in the northwest of this oasis and for most of antiquity was this area’s dominant town, second overall only to the ancient and modern capital of the oasis—Mothis or Mut. The most important town of medieval, Ottoman, and modern 4. For surveys of the archaeology of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, see Bagnall 2001 and Bagnall and Davoli 2011. 5. From 2004 to 2012, the project included a field school for undergraduate students. It was terminated by order of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. 6. Bagnall 1997; referred to in this book as KAB.

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Figure 4. The scarp bordering the oasis on the north.

northwestern Dakhla, the wonderful mud-brick settlement of El-Qasr, lies a few km away from Amheida and was, as we shall see, part of its territory in antiquity. We know quite a lot about this oasis by now, because it has been the object of regional survey for the last three and a half decades by the Dakhleh Oasis Project (DOP), directed by Anthony J. Mills, and because for more than twenty-five years an Australian team directed by Colin Hope has been excavating within the framework of the DOP at ancient Kellis.7 At Kellis have been found many papyri, ostraka, and wooden tablets, perhaps most famously its trove of Manichaean literary texts and family letters, but also a rich array of both documents and literary texts.8 It is from these documents that we get most of the information that we had about Trimithis before we began our excavations. For my own scholarly purposes, the fact that Kellis was abandoned around 400 CE, coupled with the fact that the focus of the excavations there was on areas belonging to the third- to fourth-century occupation of the village, 7. For the DOP generally, see http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/archaeology/excavations-indakhleh-oasis-egypt/. 8. A book edited by Professor Hope synthesizing the discoveries at Kellis is in preparation, to be published by Cambridge University Press. For this reason we have in the present volume avoided detailed discussion of these finds, but they have had a profound impact on our interpretation of our own finds at every stage. For these papyri, see the seven volumes of P.Kell.

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means that its archaeological and documentary finds have been heavily concentrated in late antiquity, a period to which I was first drawn thirtyfive years ago and continue to find of compelling interest.9 But it has something for almost every other taste and interest, too, as will become evident from the following chapters. The Great Oasis is a distinctive and remarkable part of Egypt. Because of its great distance from the Nile valley, it posed challenges for travel and transportation not otherwise present in a country bound together and granted cheap transport by a great river. In Chapter 1 we say more about the physical landscape and the geographical constraints imposed by location. Despite the difficulties of travel and transportation, the oasis was occupied already in prehistoric times when underground fossil water came to the surface in artesian springs—the mounds deposited by which are still visible today—even as the surroundings were turning from savanna into desert in the fourth millennium BCE. The oases have been thought to have led Egypt into the Neolithic revolution.10 Dakhla was explored and then occupied by the Egyptians of the valley under the Old Kingdom pharaohs, certainly already to some degree in the 4th Dynasty under Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid, then most extensively under the 6th Dynasty. There are even traces of the Early Dynastic Period to be found at Amheida, suggesting that there is much we do not yet know. The French Institute in Cairo began the exploration of the most important Old Kingdom site, ‘Ain Asil not far from the village of Balat—where the governors had their seat and their tombs—near the other end of the oasis from Amheida, just before the start of the Dakhleh Oasis Project. Their work has produced important results: a palace, tombs, many striking objects, and written materials— Egyptian texts written, quite exceptionally, on clay tablets.11 Amheida and Mut also have Old Kingdom remains, and at ‘Ain el-Gazzareen, a few km south of Amheida, a large Old Kingdom site has been partially excavated.12 We know much less about the oasis, and even less about the other part of the Great Oasis—what is today the Kharga Oasis—for the next millennium-and-a-half, although there was certainly a New Kingdom temple at Mut, where the sequence is fairly complete, and (we now 9. See Bagnall 1993 for the broadest exposition of this interest. 10. McDonald 2013. 11. The results of these excavations have been published in eleven volumes (to 2013) of Balat, in the series “Fouilles de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale.” 12. See Mills 2012 and Pettman 2012, with bibliography.

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Figure 5. Plan of Amheida.

know) one at Amheida, to judge from surface finds of pottery and the discovery in 2014 of a stela of Seti II. Identifiable habitation sites, however, are not very numerous until they increase exponentially under the Romans. In late antiquity there was a moderate decline in numbers of sites, followed by a dramatic falling-off of the extent of habitation for quite a few centuries—although never any actual abandonment of the oasis, it must be added. But it is fair to say that at many sites we tend to find the last documents, or the last major horizon of documentation, to be the 360s, the period of the Kellis Agricultural Account Book, and Kellis itself seems to have been abandoned a few decades later. Other sites undoubtedly continue later, but little has been excavated so far from the last 250 years of Roman rule.13 13. See Bowen 2012 for the church at Deir Abu Matta, where the pottery extends into the sixth century.

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Amheida, with pottery of all periods from Neolithic to late Roman visible in surface survey, thus appeared potentially a diachronic key to the history of the oasis. Mut also presents a long time range, even longer than Amheida’s, from early pharaonic into early Islamic, but only a tiny part of that site has survived the building of the modern city over it and the concomitant destruction of what little escaped that fate; the site was largely ruined even before the modern expansion of the city.14 Trimithis, in contrast, has never been reoccupied. In several areas—one of them very significant, as we shall see—groups in search of soil, baked bricks, and stones have dug pits of different sizes, but the site as a whole was not severely damaged by this activity. Natural causes have done far more harm, in fact, as is detailed in Chapter 1. Even so, the city mostly remains to be explored. We therefore have the possibility of studying a GraecoRoman Egyptian town site at its full extent, something only rarely possible. That extent is very considerable, the Roman city stretching out on an uneven ground with the hill on which stood the temple of Thoth as its center (Fig. 5). Because some areas are still covered by sand dunes, we may not yet have a comprehensive picture of the full expanse of the ancient site. Including cemetery areas, it extends over an area of at least 2.5 × 1.5 km. We have a limited amount of information about Amheida’s state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries before the modern exploration of the oasis began with the Egyptian archaeologist Ahmed Fakhry and after him the Dakhleh Oasis Project.15 The travellers Archibald Edmonstone,16 Bernardino Drovetti,17 John Gardner Wilkinson,18 and Gerhard Rohlfs all visited the site in the nineteenth century. Wilkinson travelled to Dakhla in 1825 and provided the most interesting description of Amheida: “the extensive mounds of an ancient town with a sandstone gateway. The fragments of stone which lie scattered about appear to indicate the site of a temple, now destroyed. These mounds are about half a mile square, and below them to the E. is a spring called ‘Ain el Keeád. They are also known as Lémhada. The only ruins now remaining are of crude brick; and from the state of their vaulted rooms, they appear to have been of Roman time.” This description is remarkably accurate, 14. Excavations at Mut el-Kharab under the direction of Colin A. Hope have, however, been remarkably productive given the condition of the site. See, e.g., Hope and Pettman 2012 on the earliest chronological horizon there. 15. The following four paragraphs are the contribution of Olaf Kaper. 16. Edmonstone 1822: 49. 17. Drovetti 1821: 103. 18. Wilkinson 1843: II 363.

Introduction

9

containing the earliest mention of the modern name Amheida for the site. No other record exists of the sandstone gateway that Wilkinson saw, and it must have disappeared before Herbert Winlock visited Amheida in 1908. Drovetti was the first to remark on the brick pyramid, and Edmonstone noticed “a small remnant of a temple, and the fragment of a white marble statue. This last was apparently of Greek workmanship, and not without elegance, although so imperfect.” Gerhard Rohlfs with two members of his team of German scientists visited the site in 1874. He identified the stone ruins as a fortress, not a temple. They also described “mountains of potsherds”, fragments of stone vessels, small bronze objects and coins, all of which are still to be found on the surface of the site.19 The Greek version of the name, Trimithis, has an Egyptian etymology, as is apparent from the Coptic equivalent Trimhite, “The Northern Storehouse.”20 The reason why the town received this designation is unknown. Either the Greek or the Coptic name eventually gave rise to the Arabic version Lémhada, as recorded by Wilkinson in 1828, and the modern spellings al Amhâdeh (Winlock)21 and Amheida/Amhida (Dakhleh Oasis Project).22 Ahmed Fakhry visited the site in 1963 and discovered a large funerary stela dating from the First Intermediate Period, which he took to Kharga.23 The systematic archaeological investigation of the site started in 1979, when the Dakhleh Oasis Project conducted its survey of that part of the oasis, with some limited test excavations.24 A workshop with pottery kilns was excavated,25 a corner of the central room in a painted villa (see § 4.3 and 7.2), and several tombs in the cemetery, some of which had painted decoration (§ 4.2). In launching the excavation, we saw Amheida not only as the set of opportunities mentioned earlier but 19. Rohlfs 1875: 129; Rohlfs actually identified the stone ruins as a fortress, not a temple. Cf. Kaper 2001: 240: “Rohlfs, Zittel und Ascherson machten auch einen Besuch zu steinernen Mauerresten in der Gegend zwischen El Qasr und Muschiya, die Rohlfs als “Rest einer ehemaligen, vielleicht römischen Befestigung” interpretierte. An der gleichen Stelle hat man “Berge von Topfscherben”, Bruchstücke von Steingefäßen, kleinere Bronze-Gegenstände und Münzen gefunden. Es besteht kein Zweifel, daß dieser Ort die Stadtruine Amheida sei, der jetzt mit Sicherheit als die antike Stadt Trimithis identifiziert worden ist, wie schon von Lepsius vermutet worden war.” Cf. Lepsius 1874. 20. Gardner, Alcock and Funk 1999: 276 [19]. 21. Winlock 1936: 25, n. 19. 22. The variant Amhida appears in some DOP publications since 2007. 23. Osing 1982: 38. 24. Amheida was designated with a map reference as site no. 33/390-L9-1, and its cemetery to the south as site no. 33/390-K9-4; Mills 1980: 269-72. 25. Hope 1980: 307-11; Hope 1993: 123-27. See fig. 59 for some of these kilns.

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An Oasis City

also as a chance to look at a number of historical issues of longstanding interest. None of these is limited to late antiquity, but all—at least in many views of Egypt in late antiquity—reach a kind of fulfillment in this period and are thus well approached through Amheida and other sites of its chronological horizon. One of these issues is economic growth in antiquity, for which the rapid development of the Dakhla Oasis in the early Roman period and its later virtual collapse raise all sorts of interesting questions relevant to contemporary debates about whether Roman economic growth was only extensive or intensive too—that is, whether it represented growth in average income per capita. The degree to which the development of remote areas was constrained by the cost of land transportation is an obvious factor here, but many other issues, like demand for products, technological change, and legal systems, come into play as well. Another area of interest is urbanism in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, particularly the nature of diachronic change. Here in Dakhla, if anywhere, we should be able to see the Roman impact, the changes from classical to late antique, and a genuine decline, probably based on locally contingent factors. Because Trimithis at some point changed its status from a village to a city, it should be particularly interesting in this respect. Finally, the cultural mix of the oasis and its change over time are open to our gaze. An Egyptian village and religious center over the course of many pre-Roman centuries becomes a Roman city (polis). Kellis, which was evidently a new foundation in the Graeco-Roman period and never a city, offers us a handy basis for comparison and contrast close at home. How similar is Trimithis to Kellis? What distinctions between village and city and within the region would we find? For some of these questions we have found considerable evidence; for others, we anticipate finding it in future seasons. But the outcome of excavation is even less readily predictable than the weather, and there have been many surprises. In the following chapters, we have tried to describe what we have found so far. Like any dig, Amheida is a team effort, and this book is equally a product of a core team of authors.26

26. Many more individuals have contributed to it through their work than only the authors of what follows. For a project directory and complete list of participants in the excavation from 2004 to 2015, see http://amheida.org/index.php?content=directory.

1 Amheida in Its Surroundings 1.1. The natural landscape and its evolution Paola Davoli

Lying in the western part of the Dakhla Oasis, in an oblong sandy area south of El-Qasr, Amheida is today completely surrounded by fields (Fig. 6). The oasis landscape is a patchwork formed by green land, laboriously reclaimed from the desert through irrigation, and sandy areas of various sizes, where water is not present and cultivation is thus impossible. Some of these barren areas are covered by sand dunes that encroach upon the green land, the roads, and the villages. The landscape is therefore variable according to the movements of the dunes and changes in the water supply. In this part of the Dakhla Oasis, the present pattern of the cultivated fields and the dunes clearly follows a north– south orientation, which has been produced by a stream of dunes that move down from the northern escarpment and flow toward the south at a rate of 7 m per year. So the cultivated fields are possible only between the dunes. The ancient landscape shared these characteristics, but its green areas were watered by different wells and thus located at least partly in different places (Fig. 7). The competing forces of the accumulation of sand and of erosion from winds and water due to climatic changes have also contributed to the formation and alteration of the oasis landscape. Human activities are responsible for substantial modifications as well, especially in the last 11

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Figure 6. Satellite view of the Amheida and El-Qasr area (2000) (Base image from Ikonos).

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13

Figure 7. View of Amheida amid cultivation.

thirty years or so, with the introduction of paved roads and of drilling machines that can reach deep aquifers. Intensive-agriculture policies, population growth, and changes in the way of life have led to a great consumption of water and to the consequent formation of wastewater lakes. The Dakhleh Oasis Project survey identified between 1977 and 1987 about five hundred sites of various historical periods and about four hundred of prehistoric eras.1 One of the major tasks of the DOP was to study the interaction between environmental changes and human activities in the region, which involved specialists in several fields collecting data and investigating both natural and cultural evidence and features. This complex regional and diachronic study, enriched by archaeological excavations led by different teams and by new surveys, is still under way.2 Looking at the distribution of the features, settlements, and necropoleis of historical periods, we can gain some perspective on the changes in the distribution of the population, which almost certainly was determined by the availability of water. It seems evident that the 1. Churcher and Mills (eds.) 1999. For more information about the project see: http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/archaeology/excavations-in-dakhleh-oasis-egypt/. 2. Adelsberger and Smith 2010.

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An Oasis City

Figure 8. Burials cut by a water channel.

extent of the ancient fields was different from that of the present green land, which is, taking into account the whole oasis, significantly greater. In this simple analysis, however, we should keep in mind that some ancient sites and features could have been invisible during the DOP survey because of the presence of the ever moving dunes or of cultivation. The regional survey should therefore, in principle, be repeated at intervals to discover new features or to confirm the collected data in areas with much wind-blown sand. The local landscape can change in just a few years, as is well demonstrated by recent villages and fields having been abandoned after the encroachment of the dunes, or by newly visible archaeological sites, as in the case of Area 11 at Amheida, which came to light only in 2013 after a dune had moved on southwards. The study of the Amheida area landscape started in 2006 with the documentation of the then present situation: the topographic survey of the visible buildings was accompanied by a survey of the main natural features, like the dunes, spring mounds, and yardangs, of other artificial features such as channels, and of areas covered by potsherds. The denuded geological strata together with the archaeological remains suggested deep changes over time in the ancient landscape, caused by deflation. In fact, some graves were found completely exposed and intersected by later channels running southeast of the pyramid among residual mounds and along the flat plane of the south cemetery. These graves are probably to be dated to the Old Kingdom, and the skeletons

Amheida in Its Surroundings

15

Figure 9. Preserved barrel vaults.

deposited at the bottom of the burials are now totally exposed and badly eroded (Fig. 8). Harsh erosion is also evident on top of the temple hill, where it has been calculated that at least 1.5 m of stratigraphy have been lost. Erosion is also responsible for the disappearance of most of the upper parts of buildings: only a few are preserved above the present surface formed by wind-blown sand. The best-preserved buildings are those that were rapidly covered by sand; in contrast, those situated on top of natural elevations have been exposed for longer, so are eroded almost as far as floor level (like the church, B7, in Area 2.3 and the houses in Area 1). The buildings located in the lower areas were quickly invaded by clean sand up to the ceilings of the ground floors and eventually covered. This burial allowed for the preservation of ceilings, mostly barrel vaults, which are still in situ, as in the south quarters (Fig. 9). The natural erosion of whole buildings or of just their upper parts, human activity aiming to recover ancient building materials, and the accumulation of sand and dunes have produced a leveling of the city surface and a radically altered perception of its skyline and environment. The pottery sherds covering most of the site like a carpet (Fig. 10) are mostly derived from the erosion of the buildings, where sherds were employed as construction material in walls and ceilings and pots were stored on the roofs.

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An Oasis City

Figure 10. A sherd-covered site surface.

Figure 11. A Mut-formation mound of reddish shale.

Amheida in Its Surroundings

17

Accumulation of sand and deflation are natural phenomena that occur continuously and are more severe in some periods, due to climatic changes.3 The geological and geomorphological study of the area carried out in 2010 by an international team is now focusing on residual yardangs so as to determine the major phases of erosion that occurred before the Roman period.4 In the present state of our knowledge, we can say that the settlement was built on an area periodically invaded by chains of dunes and exposed to erosion that was not uniform, as has happened in more recent times. To these phenomena we have to add dry phases in which the water table shrank, favoring rapid dune movement. The natural spring mounds needed to be reactivated several times by artificially deepening the wells, as is shown by the pottery found on and near those mounds. The west and north areas of Trimithis seem to have been sandier than the east, as is true today. Houses and living quarters moved according to the dunes, and thus the settlement was continuously having to deal with the local environment. The same would likely have happened to the farmland. It is the combination of these phenomena that caused the disappearance of some of the oldest settlements and features—of which only scattered potsherds remain—such as possible small Old Kingdom settlements and workshops west of Amheida. On the other hand, ruins like the Old Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period buildings on the central hill were not eroded, because they had already been buried below deep strata from human occupation. The fossilized sand dunes on which part of Trimithis is built have been reached in several trenches in Area 2.1, and this level has been explored in depth in Street 2. At this point, the trench (3 m deep) reached a geological layer rich in organics, but could not reach the Mut formation (a reddish shale) readily visible on the surface in nearby places.5 Nonetheless, a small Mut formation mound is present south of Area 1 (Fig. 11), on one side of a round depression and near a series of kilns used for pottery production. It seems possible that the shale was artificially dug out from deeper layers and used for manufacturing pottery in the fourth century CE, as the materials of the local vessels suggest. 3. McDonald, Churcher et al. 2001. 4. Bravard et al. (in preparation). 5. The trench was 1 × 1 m: the fossilized dune starts from an elevation of 135.97 m above sea level and stops at 133.5 m above sea level; the layer of sand and clay mixed with organics starts at 133.5 m. Small and badly eroded potsherds were present only on the surface of this ancient dune.

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An Oasis City

Also, mounds of light-brown clay, employed for making mud bricks, were and still are present in the area. One such mound is preserved near the modern village of Bir Itnayn el-Arab and was used to make the mud bricks of the replica of the house of Serenos. Others can be seen in the fields between Amheida and El-Qasr. Considering the enormous quantity of mud bricks used in the city buildings and tombs, there must have been more such mounds around the settlement. Some, later covered by buildings, are in the area of the city and in the necropolis. Today the surface of those mounds is severely eroded, and very few features or buildings survive. The carpet of potsherds is the only evidence of the presence of ancient buildings there. The empty, barren area south of the city is characterized by mounds covering tombs and by spring mounds, one of which (Fig. 12) is of impressive dimensions. Potsherds included in the mud layers of the channel coming out of it suggest a long duration for the activity of the spring, possibly aided by some artificial reactivation. Given the deflation, it is extremely difficult to say when the low, flat areas were covered by soil and cultivation. However, a pigeon house was built in the fourth century, presumably near a farmhouse, at the north border of the cemetery. A topographical and pottery survey is planned for this area in the near future. The geological, geomorphological, and archaeological analysis of Amheida’s present state of conservation has led to the following conclusions: Roman Trimithis was constructed on an uneven area characterized by fossilized dunes, soft dunes, mounds of clay and shale, and flat, lower lands, where most of the wells for the city water supply were probably situated.6 The area was already inhabited at least from the Old Kingdom onward (§2.1), but at present it is not possible to know whether it was only one settlement, how big it was, or whether it was continuously inhabited. Data collected by the Dakhleh Oasis Project survey and our observations at Amheida would suggest the presence of different, probably small, settlements and workshops located north and west of the Amheida area. The erosion and the accumulation of sand prevent a clear view of the older phases. The Roman-period settlement was built according to the gradients, favoring an orthogonal orientation of the streets and alleys, but also following the natural shape of the ground (see §3.1). It is not yet clear 6. The head of one such well is visible at 137.5 m above sea level, southeast of Serenos’ house.

Amheida in Its Surroundings

19

Figure 12. A large spring mound south of Amheida.

just how great was the extent of the Imperial-period city, but as far as we have been able to see in the excavated areas, some dwellings of the third century CE continued to be used in the fourth, while other buildings, like the public bath, were partly demolished and replaced. The stratigraphy found in all the excavated areas testifies to the absence of sand deposits between the different building periods; this probably means that the city was surrounded by fields—on the scale of today’s cultivation or even greater. Probably at the end of the fourth century or not long after, Trimithis was invaded by a field of sand dunes running from north to south.7 7. These are still visible on satellite views.

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Figure 13. Standing walls on the slope of the temple hill.

These moved further south in the following centuries and left behind a consistent deposit of sand that was trapped in the ancient buildings and streets. We know neither the shape nor the extent of the moving dunes, but their activity must have been instrumental in the variable preservation or erosion of the ancient buildings. Few walls are preserved for as much as a few meters above the present sand surface of the site, and it is hard to find an explanation without considering the possible changes in a landscape of moving dunes. Most of the buildings preserved up to the height of the roof vaults are covered by sand up to 138–9 m above sea level. And most of the features above that elevation, both natural and manmade, have suffered massive erosion. In some areas we find exceptions, as in the case of the still-standing walls (Fig. 13), but we can observe that, generally speaking, mud-brick buildings located above 139 m above sea level have been worn down to the foundation courses and, in some places—for instance, on the temple hill—even below that level. Only the very robust clay hills east and west of the site have partially survived to a considerable height. The accumulation of pottery on their surface is all that is left of the houses once standing on them. Most of what was lying below 138–9 m elevation has been preserved thanks to the massive accumulation of wind-blown sand that we still see.

Amheida in Its Surroundings

21

Sand dunes west and southwest of the site, all above 139 m elevation, still cover substantial portions of the ancient inhabited area. Taking them into account together with the hills covered with sherds and the areas in between, it is likely that the overall extent of the urban area of the Roman period was twice as large as what is visible on the surface today. The long life of the settlement, which was continuously rebuilt in the same place despite the constant changes in the landscape, is certainly due to its favorable position on the main road system but also to the abundance of wells and springs.

1.2. The sacred landscape Olaf E. Kaper

Cities normally depend on hinterlands. The city of Trimithis was no exception; it functioned within the agricultural region at the western end of the Dakhla Oasis, which was known as Sawahet, “The Back of the Oasis.” This name is attested from about 1300 BCE onwards up to about 700 BCE.8 The prefix Sa-, meaning “back”, is not known elsewhere in relation to an oasis, and Giddy9 warns against translating the term literally, because it may also be a feature of hieroglyphic group writing in the rendition of foreign place names. However, this instance shows no group writing, because it is followed by the regular spelling for the word “oasis”, wahet. The earliest evidence for this toponym is from the New Kingdom, from the site of Amarna. A wine vessel from the palace of King Akhenaten was labeled as containing wine from “the vineyard of Sawahet.”10 Apparently the city of Amheida formed part of a wine-growing region, and the name Sawahet referred to more than just the settlement. In the 20th Dynasty, the name is found again in Papyrus Turin 2074, verso, from Deir el-Medina. This papyrus contains a list of persons, four of whom are from Sawahet and nine from the town of Hibis.11 That the toponym could denote an entire region as well as a town is again confirmed by the text on the Greater Dakhla Stela (Fig. 14), which was found at Mut, in which specifically a “town of Sawahet” is mentioned.12 The region must have been sizable, because the stela mentions a part named “the 8. Kaper 1992: 124-129. 9. Giddy 1987: 130 n. 6. 10. Pendlebury 1951: III/2, pls. 86, 51. 11. Černý 1955: 29. 12. Gardiner 1933.

Amheida in Its Surroundings

21

Sand dunes west and southwest of the site, all above 139 m elevation, still cover substantial portions of the ancient inhabited area. Taking them into account together with the hills covered with sherds and the areas in between, it is likely that the overall extent of the urban area of the Roman period was twice as large as what is visible on the surface today. The long life of the settlement, which was continuously rebuilt in the same place despite the constant changes in the landscape, is certainly due to its favorable position on the main road system but also to the abundance of wells and springs.

1.2. The sacred landscape Olaf E. Kaper

Cities normally depend on hinterlands. The city of Trimithis was no exception; it functioned within the agricultural region at the western end of the Dakhla Oasis, which was known as Sawahet, “The Back of the Oasis.” This name is attested from about 1300 BCE onwards up to about 700 BCE.8 The prefix Sa-, meaning “back”, is not known elsewhere in relation to an oasis, and Giddy9 warns against translating the term literally, because it may also be a feature of hieroglyphic group writing in the rendition of foreign place names. However, this instance shows no group writing, because it is followed by the regular spelling for the word “oasis”, wahet. The earliest evidence for this toponym is from the New Kingdom, from the site of Amarna. A wine vessel from the palace of King Akhenaten was labeled as containing wine from “the vineyard of Sawahet.”10 Apparently the city of Amheida formed part of a wine-growing region, and the name Sawahet referred to more than just the settlement. In the 20th Dynasty, the name is found again in Papyrus Turin 2074, verso, from Deir el-Medina. This papyrus contains a list of persons, four of whom are from Sawahet and nine from the town of Hibis.11 That the toponym could denote an entire region as well as a town is again confirmed by the text on the Greater Dakhla Stela (Fig. 14), which was found at Mut, in which specifically a “town of Sawahet” is mentioned.12 The region must have been sizable, because the stela mentions a part named “the 8. Kaper 1992: 124-129. 9. Giddy 1987: 130 n. 6. 10. Pendlebury 1951: III/2, pls. 86, 51. 11. Černý 1955: 29. 12. Gardiner 1933.

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Figure 14. The Greater Dakhla Stela (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; photo O. E. Kaper).

west of Sawahet.” It is also said to contain vineyards, which confirms the information already established for the time of Akhenaten. From the 26th Dynasty onwards, the toponym Sawahet occurs no more in the sources. Instead, the texts from at least the time of Amasis onwards use the toponym Setwah (written 4t-wAH or more rarely 4t-wHa), of which we may assume that the pronunciation was similar or even identical to that of the earlier written version of the name.13 What could be the reason to change the official name of an entire region? There are no parallels for this practice from other parts of Egypt. The fact that the pronunciation of the place name remained (more or less) the same may indicate that there had been some aversion against the earlier one, and perhaps “The Back of the Oasis” was considered pejorative. We may assume that the new name should be translated as “The Place of Endowment,” and that it refers to a large endowment for the temple established in the time between the last occurrence of the earlier name Sawahet around 740 BCE and the first occurrence of the new name around 570 BCE. At present, there is no evidence for any official activity at the temple during the 25th Dynasty, and it is therefore possible that 13. Kaper 1992: 124–9.

Amheida in Its Surroundings

23

the building of a new and larger temple under Amasis coincided with the establishment of a large endowment during his reign. The Greater Dakhla Stela thus points at Amheida’s close relations with the temple of Seth at Mut el-Kharab from an early date. Later in the Third Intermediate Period, the local governor during the reign of Takeloth III supplied the temple of Thoth with a small but regular endowment. In the reign of Piye, the same governor did the same for the temple of Seth. For both donations, the commemorative stelae erected have been preserved.14 The temple of Amasis was decorated with a large image of the god Seth of Mut, thereby demonstrating the importance of this god also for the town of Amheida. A large stela from the Ptolemaic or Roman period (Fig. 15) showing the same image was also found at the site. No references have been found to Hibis, or to other sites in the oases, but the amount of preserved text material is limited. For the Roman period, we know much more about the hinterland of the city of Trimithis. This is because of the number of monuments remaining from that time, such as the late-Roman fortress at the site of El-Qasr, the cemetery of El-Muzawwaqa, and the temple of Deir elHagar within the immediate catchment area of the city. The fortress, probably built in the late third century CE, was located three km north of Amheida,15 and there is no doubt that the city and its fortress were in close contact. The cemetery of El-Muzawwaqa is cut into a small rocky hill situated roughly four km northwest of the ancient city, and contains private burials in addition to burials of sacred animals of the local gods Amun-Re and Thoth. One of the priests of Thoth of the early Roman period, a man by the name of Petubastis, was buried in this hill in a chamber decorated with Egyptian scenes and hieroglyphic inscriptions, as well as a zodiac on its ceiling. The temple of Deir el-Hagar, about six km to the west of Amheida, is of great interest because there is no important settlement preserved around it that would justify the building’s relatively large size.16 Only a small agricultural settlement lies south and east of the temple precinct. In addition, it has a temenos wall that has doorways at regular intervals (Fig. 16). No other temenos wall with a similar number of openings is known from Egyptian temples. Given these doorways, and given the large number of visitors’ graffiti (Fig. 17) preserved on one of them, it seems that the building functioned specifically as a festival temple. 14. Kaper and Demarée 2005; Janssen 1968. 15. Kucera 2012. 16. Mills 1999 gives a brief report on the site.

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Figure 15. The stela of Seth from Amheida.

Amheida in Its Surroundings

Figure 16. Inside the temenos wall at Deir el-Hagar (photo O. E. Kaper).

Figure 17. Visitors’ graffiti at Deir el-Hagar (photo O. E. Kaper).

25

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An Oasis City

Figure 18. Plan of the temple at Deir el-Hagar (James Knudstad/Dakhleh Oasis Project).

Figure 19. A stibadium (banqueting bench) inside the temenos at Deir el-Hagar (photo O. E. Kaper).

Amheida in Its Surroundings

27

Figure 20. A relief at Deir el-Hagar depicting Thoth and Nehmet-Away (photo O. E. Kaper).

The many doorways allowed a large crowd to gather in front of it and watch the spectacle of the god Amun-Re’s procession (Fig. 18). One of the unique features of the courtyard is the several circular banqueting benches (stibadia) against the enclosure wall on either side of the processional route (Fig. 19), on which important guests could be waited upon while watching the proceedings. Among the graffiti on the Deir el-Hagar enclosure wall are a number of images of rams, a baboon, and an ibis. These refer to the sacred animals of the god of the temple, Amun-Re, and of Thoth of Amheida. In the relief decoration of the temple, Thoth likewise occupied a special place, even though the temple was dedicated to Amun and the other gods of Thebes, the religious center of Upper Egypt. In the first hall (called the pronaos) of the temple, the lower parts of the walls are usually reserved for its principal gods, and it is here that we expect to find Amun-Re and Mut of Deir el-Hagar, but Thoth and Nehmet-Away of Trimithis are also depicted (Fig. 20). Deir el-Hagar and Trimithis were closely associated not only because they were both located in the area named Setwah, but also because the population of Amheida came to attend the festival of Amun-Re at Deir el-Hagar. There they would find their town’s god,

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Figure 21. A relief at Deir el-Hagar from the reign of Titus, portraying Amun-Re, Khonsu and Mut (photo O. E. Kaper).

Thoth, depicted in prominent positions on the walls, and some would leave votive offerings with his image, as happened during the reign of Vespasian.17 The temple of Deir el-Hagar was probably first built as a small sanctuary in the reign of Nero, after which the decoration of the innermost room was finished in Vespasian’s reign. Under Titus and Domitian, the temple was extended and decoration was added on a larger scale (Fig. 21). It is certainly significant that these works were executed at the same time that the larger temple of Thoth at Amheida was being built and decorated. At Trimithis, the builders made use of the stones from the temples of the Late Period, which were being demolished to make room for the new buildings. There is no evidence of a similar procedure having been followed at Deir el-Hagar. The two temples were built simultaneously and, arguably, decorated by the same artisans, as their workmanship is of similar style and quality.

17. Stela Cairo JdE 51943; see Van Zoest and Kaper 2006: 28–9.

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1.3. The economic landscape Roger S. Bagnall

In the Introduction, we called attention to the distance of the Great Oasis from the Nile valley and to the apparently dramatic rise in the extent of settlement in Dakhla during the Roman period. The growth in accurate knowledge of the chronology of oasis pottery in the last two decades has led to the redating of some wares found in the DOP’s survey of the oasis, which has led in turn to the identification of more Ptolemaic sites at places once thought to be only Roman.18 Consequently, the rise in habitation sites from Ptolemaic to Roman seems a bit less marked now than it did when the survey was carried out during 1977–1987, but it is still evident that growth in the Roman period was striking. The Egyptian oases are far from being the only parts of the Roman Near East to witness expansion to such unprecedented levels of occupation, often not matched even in modern times. Given the high cost of overland transport in antiquity—a theme familiar to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with ancient economic history—one might well wonder how such growth was possible. Why would anyone settle in so remote and seemingly forbidding a place as Dakhla? And how could people earn a living there, let alone become rich? Furthermore, why would rich people from outside the oasis invest there? The oases are constituted essentially of soil and water, plus some stone in outcroppings and the bordering scarp, mostly sandstone of moderate quality. Actually, that description sounds at first blush like much of the Nile valley, too. But in the valley it was relatively easy to supply anything not available locally, because transportation on the great river was cheap; for the same reason it was easy to export the agricultural produce of the valley’s rich soil to places from which other goods were to be acquired. The oases lacked this cheap and easy transportation network. By ancient direct road, Dakhla is about 365 km from the valley at its closest point; by the less strenuous route allowing a stop in Kharga, it is still farther. What, then, was the economic landscape generated by the economy (described in §6.1) and embedded in the natural landscape described in §1.1? First, it required significant capital investment. Without investment in the infrastructure of wells and water-distribution systems, the oasis was just so much empty desert. Even if natural pressure was in most 18. Gill forthcoming.

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cases sufficient to bring the water to or near the surface, wells needed to be dug to the water-bearing strata. We do not know what the cost of digging a well and supplying it with control and distribution systems was, but one ostrakon from Trimithis (O.Trim. 1.19) suggests that the gross annual revenue from the use of a well’s water was in the neighborhood of 50 gold solidi, or more than two-thirds of a pound of gold. The capital value may thus have been something like five to six pounds of gold, a very large sum and far beyond the reach of most Egyptians. As far as we can see, these wells were privately owned, and there is no evidence for the assertion sometimes encountered that the expansion of irrigation in the oasis was driven by central-government planning. Rather, the wells represent massive private investment. But because that investment was so massive, it must represent the activity of a relatively small number of rich individuals or families, not a broad-gauged movement. This fact will be important in thinking about the society of the oasis (§6.4). Second, the oasis landscape, as we noted in §1.1, is not one of continuous cultivation—a green expanse in the middle of the desert— but of plantings clustered around the wells. Sometimes these wells were, and still are, close to one another; but in other instances there are large stretches of desert between the islands of cultivation. This patchy landscape can still be seen today, and was much more prominent even a decade or so back, before the sprawl of deep wells dug in recent years. Wells and their settlements formed zones around the major population centers like Trimithis, Kellis, Mothis, and Mesobe. The economic landscape was thus one requiring plenty of local transportation to connect up the centers of production and dwelling. Not only were many long-distance camel caravans required to export the oasis products to the valley, but armies of donkeys, and their drivers, were needed to keep the extended territory of the oasis working as a unit. Indeed, the landscape was thick with this traffic of donkeys, which are ubiquitous in the papyri and ostraka. Around the wells was a complex array of cultivations. Because distance and transport costs made it uneconomical to provide the people of the oasis with staple crops from the valley, the oasis had to be self-supporting in basic foodstuffs like wheat, barley, legumes, and vegetables; to that list may be added ordinary wine. Although highquality wine was often an item of interregional trade, everyday drink was too bulky and not valuable enough to make overland transport as far as Dakhla a reasonable proposition. The arable crops were grown in small

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basins watered via channels from the wells. We know that along with the more familiar food crops just mentioned the oasis fields grew millet and cotton in the summer, at a time when the Nile valley was under water. The landscape was thus seasonally variable, but in a different way from the valley. The arable plantings were probably inexpensive to maintain once the water-supply infrastructure was in place. Their value no doubt varied, cotton being the most valuable because exportable and, at least once spun into thread, high in value proportionate to bulk. Alongside these field crops, and perhaps in part interspersed with them, were large numbers of trees. It was here that the oases’ distinct advantage really lay. In the valley, trees required elevated ground not reached by the Nile floodwaters; consequently, they demanded artificial irrigation by expensive water-lifting equipment. In the oases, by contrast, the water flowed 365 days a year and never flooded the trees’ roots. Not only the vineyards but also the date palms and olive trees benefited from this geography, and these were the source of the high-value fruits exported for cash. They also, of course, are another form of investment, requiring some patience for eventual returns, as dates and olives, in particular, take years to produce their potential yields. One major drawback of not experiencing the Nile flood, however, was an acute need for fertilizer. In the valley, the arable lands received fresh silt from the flood each year, so that only the raised, artificially irrigated garden lands needed fertilization. In the oasis, all of the land did. For the arable areas, this must have come in large part from growing nitrogenfixing leguminous crops destined for animal fodder—the “donkey gasoline” leguminous greenstuffs familiar to visitors to the oases today. For the vineyards and orchards, fertilizer meant dung: dung from the cattle tethered in the fields, human night-soil, and above all droppings from the millions of pigeons raised in the striking farm buildings that are a staple feature of ancient rural sites throughout the oases. These buildings (Figs. 22–23) are largely of standard plan, with side-by-side vaulted storage rooms on the ground floor and pigeon quarters on the upper level. The pigeons both provided fertilizer and filled a need for dietary protein, just as they do today in rural Egypt. The pigeon houses constitute another element of necessary investment for the economic landscape of the oasis. Because the archaeology of these rural farmsteads is very inadequately explored so far, we know little about the facilities for processing produce that must have existed. The only such settlement to be even partly

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Figure 22. A pigeon tower northwest of Amheida, exterior view.

Figure 23. A pigeon tower east of Kellis, interior view.

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excavated so far is ‘Ain el-Gedida (see §6.2). The ostraka reveal the presence of multiple wine-production facilities around the wells, the places designated in Greek as hydreuma and in Egyptian as pmoun (“the water of ” followed by a name). The pressing floors and vats were located in these hydreumata, to minimize the distance that the bulky fresh grapes had to travel. None has yet been excavated in Dakhla, although such facilities have been excavated elsewhere.19 Similarly unknown to us are the olive-processing facilities; very few millstones from olive presses have been identified by survey in Dakhla so far—again, in contrast to other parts of the Roman world. But these too must have been situated around the hydreumata. Even date-pitting and -compression must have been part of the annual activity of the rural centers. And once again, wine-production installations and olive presses, which needed hydraulic (lime) plaster to protect the valuable liquids, were not cheap to create; they called for substantial volume to be economical. Large-scale pottery production was also required for the containers in which the high-value liquid products would be stored and shipped; not surprisingly, a pottery workshop was part of the production and storage facilities at ‘Ain elGedida (§6.2). One other element of the production and distribution landscape of the oasis remains totally unknown so far: Where were the olives, olive oil, dates, cotton, and other export crops gathered and turned into caravan shipments? Were there marketplaces populated with brokers and consolidators? Were the transporters organized into companies or guilds, as seems to have been the case with the caravaneers in the Eastern Desert, based in family firms from the town of Coptos? So far, neither documents nor archaeology have given us a clue about this entire aspect of the economic landscape of the oasis. We are reminded once again of how much remains to be discovered.

19. Dzierzbicka 2005.

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2 Amheida Before the Romans 2.1. Early remains on the temple hill Paola Davoli

The area of the main temple of Trimithis is located at the top of the settlement’s central hill (Fig. 24). Like the whole archaeological area, it has suffered from harsh erosion (see §1.1), as well as undergoing considerable plundering. On the basis of the only visible surviving segment of the temenos wall (Fig. 25) it has been calculated that at least 1.5 m of the stratigraphy here has been lost. Several pits of different dimensions and depth have destroyed the original deposition sequence. These pits were dug principally to recover soil rich in organic materials (natural fertilizer, sebbakh), in what was virtually a mining operation pursued during various phases using the torya, a typical agricultural tool, of which clear marks remain on the surviving edges of the pits (Fig. 26).1 Other activities, like the removal of stone blocks from the temple, contributed to the destruction and disordering of the archaeological remains. No evidence has been found to date these activities, but we can plausibly associate them with the development of local settlements—such as El-Qasr in the Mamluk and Ottoman periods—and of agriculture, always in need of fertilizer, as already noted. 1. A similar activity was recognized at ‘Ain Asil and contributed to the destruction of the upper stratigraphy, together with erosion: Soukiassian, Wuttmann, and Schaad 1990: 347.

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Figure 24. Plan of Amheida showing the reconstructed temple precinct.

Figure 25. View of the surviving part of the temenos wall.

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Figure 26. A pit on the temple hill showing marks from digging.

To judge from the remarks of nineteenth-century travellers, much of this damage took place in the second half of that century (see Introduction). The main aim of the excavation carried out so far in this area (Area 4) was to recover data about the presence of the temple and thus all the remains of the building. Thousands of stone blocks were found collapsed in dozens of pits, some of them first dug when parts of the temple walls were still standing to a height of 2 or 3 m. As a consequence, the walls and foundations collapsed into the pits—this was shown most clearly during the 2013 season (Fig. 27). These events, together with the natural erosion and accumulation of sand, changed the landscape and completely altered the stratigraphy. The pits cover all of the temple area. In order to understand what kind of activity they represent, we excavated their contents, leaving their edges intact. These edges are the only witnesses to the presence of a deep anthropic stratigraphy accumulated over the millennia and testifying to the presence of mud-brick buildings, now so badly preserved that it is very difficult even to know whether they are part of a sequence of settlements or of industrial or religious establishments. The pit diggers removed between 2 and 3 m of the mud-brick walls and stratigraphy, composed of horizontal layers of reddish clay plus great quantities of

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Figure 27. Part of a wall collapsed into pits.

ashes mixed with pottery. Certainly, the oldest periods of the sequence were not reached everywhere, and there is still hope of recovering good data from a sufficiently deep stratigraphic excavation. The pottery, recovered in large quantity but all out of its original contexts, covers a time span from the Old Kingdom to the fourth century CE; mixed with it were various bearers of textual evidence, mainly hieratic, demotic, and Greek ostraka. A preliminary study of the stratigraphy visible in the edges of several pits and of the pottery2 suggests a close similarity with the archaeological situation found at ‘Ain Asil:3 nothing is left of the upper layers with deposits belonging to the periods between the New Kingdom and the mid- to late fourth century CE, except a few segments of collapsed walls, some foundations of walls, and some coffins of the sacred animal necropolis of the Late Period still in situ. However, ostraka, pottery, decorated temple blocks, and other items testify to activities and buildings dated to these periods; these are described in more detail in the next section.4 2. The pottery still needs to be fully studied; these are preliminary conclusions based on its partial study. Pascale Ballet is in charge of supervising the study of the Amheida project pottery. 3. Baud 1997: 21. 4. An ostrakon of the 19th Dynasty is published in Kaper 2010. Blocks and stelae attest to religious activities in the First Intermediate Period, the 19th (Seti II), the 20th (Ramesses IX), the 23rd (Takelot III), the 26th (Nekau II, Psamtik II, Amasis), the 27th (Petubastis IV, Darius I), and

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Figure 28. Double bread molds reused as revetment on the temple hill.

The visible walls in the surviving stratigraphy belong to at least three major building phases, but only two possible floor levels have been recognized so far. A few of them are connected with one another, and describe rectangular rooms roughly oriented with the compass. Pottery samples collected in stratigraphical sequence have allowed us to determine two main levels directly superimposed, dated to the end of the Old Kingdom or early First Intermediate Period and to the 13th Dynasty to Second Intermediate Period. The pottery of the two periods found is very similar to that discovered at ‘Ain Asil, where the same stratigraphic sequence has been found. The exceptional number of bread molds (Fig. 28), single and double, and of grinding stones in hard black sandstone, suggests the presence of a bakery in the area during the 13th Dynasty–Second Intermediate the Roman period (Titus, Domitian and possibly Hadrian): see Kaper and Demarée 2005, Kaper 2012a. Demotic ostraka have been dated to the end of the Ptolemaic or beginning of the Roman period: see O.Trim 1.280, 1.378, 1.305, 1.315, 1.422, 1.427, 1.428. The stelae found may suggest a funerary activity, but human burials can be excluded in this area: no human bones or coffins have been found; moreover the kind of materials forming the stratigraphy points to habitation or industrial activities. On New Kingdom pottery in Dakhla see Hope 2002.

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Figure 29. A steatite cylinder seal of the Early Dynastic Period, with impression.

Period.5 A great quantity of ash is also present in deeper layers, but the floor level of the end of the Old Kingdom has not yet been reached. Part of a stela dated to the end of the First Intermediate Period was found in 2012 out of its original context.6 Apparently there is a chronological gap in the sequence of layers of Area 4 where the Middle Kingdom strata should be. However, the 12th Dynasty kings Sesostris I and Amenemhat II are mentioned on a stone lid and on a cylinder seal found on the settlement surface, showing that the site was not abandoned in that period. Other objects found on the surface or in layers formed of dumped material, mainly of the third– fourth centuries CE, are dated to earlier periods, such as a piece of a slate palette (from Naqada III, the last phase of the Naqada culture) and of a steatite cylinder seal of the Early Dynastic Period (Fig. 29). Such scattered objects cannot be considered as evidence of settlements in these eras and in these locations, but they certainly invite more in-depth and extensive investigations.7 There is no clear evidence, either, of the presence of a temple in the area before the 19th Dynasty (see §2.2), but the bakery of the 13th Dynasty–Second Intermediate Period might be associated with a public function. An incomplete pottery offering-tray—with offerings roughly incised—of the kind used during the Middle Kingdom–Second Intermediate Period, was found in the area and may be related to this activity. 5. A similar situation and context are found in ‘Ain Asil, where the bakery of the 13th Dynasty also had some round silos annexed. No round silos have been recognized so far in Area 4: Baud 1997: 24. 6. Kaper forthcoming (a). 7. These periods are underrepresented in the Dakhla Oasis, but the documentation in the valley attests to a close connection to the oasis: cf. Limme 1975; Baud 1997: 27. Recent discoveries at Mut el-Kharab, in Dakhla, Kharga, and the Western Desert are bringing new data to the discussion of the Early Dynastic–Old Kingdom interaction between the local and the valley cultures: Hope and Pettman 2012.

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Thanks to this evidence it is possible to add Amheida to the list of the Old Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period settlements in the Dakhla Oasis. During those eras, ‘Ain Asil was the main city; there were located the governors’ palace and the offices of the high-ranking officials, as is well attested by the excavations of the Institut français d’archéologie orientale (IFAO) in both the settlement and in the necropolis. In the western part of the oasis, the DOP survey, too, discovered several archaeological sites in which pottery and/or features dated to these periods were found. A cemetery with an estimated one hundred Old Kingdom tombs has been identified at Amheida, east of the pyramid. Moreover, two groups of Old Kingdom pottery kilns were surveyed in 1979 west of Amheida, respectively at about 500 m and 2.5 km distant. Both places (sites 33/390 K9-1 and I9-3) are now covered by sand dunes and thus invisible.8 A significant Old Kingdom walled settlement is situated four km south of Amheida, at ‘Ain el-Gazzareen,9 and a spring mound with Old Kingdom and Roman-period ruins has been found two km north of Amheida. Old Kingdom pottery was also collected to the west, near the Muzawwaqa tombs and the Deir el-Hagar temple. A Second Intermediate Period necropolis (32/390 K1–2), located on a spring mound south of the south pyramid at Amheida, may perhaps be connected with the Second Intermediate Period settlement or the bakery found on the temple hill. In this necropolis fifty tombs were recognized—of which four were excavated—by the DOP survey in 1979.10 It is thus evident that the western part of the oasis was densely inhabited at least during the end of the Old Kingdom, and the Second Intermediate Period is also well represented. The chronological range covered by pottery and other objects, and by the stratigraphic contexts found at Amheida so far, spreads over three millennia, a situation similar to that at Mut el-Kharab. It is too early to establish or to fully appreciate the extent, the importance, and the function of the pharaonic-period settlements that were the forerunners of Roman-period Trimithis. The settlement of the Ptolemaic period is yet 8. The pottery discovered has been studied and published by Hope 1980. The Old Kingdom potsherds are said to be similar in fabric and shapes to the pottery found at ‘Ain Asil and can be dated to the 6th Dynasty and to the First Intermediate Period. 9. The archaeologists suggested a 4th Dynasty foundation and a function as trading post until the end of the Old Kingdom–First Intermediate Period: Pettman 2012. 10. Hope 1980: 293–8. A possible settlement of the Second Intermediate Period and originally connected with this cemetery is located further southeast (32/390 I5-1), but too far away to be the settlement for this cemetery.

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to be found. We need more investigation into Amheida’s vast cemetery and into the deep stratigraphy on the temple hill.

2.2. Textual and decorative evidence for the New Kingdom and the Third Intermediate Period Olaf E. Kaper

One of the unexpected finds among the remains of the temple was an ostrakon bearing a literary text, known as the Kemyt, which was used as a school exercise (Fig. 30). This ostrakon was found among the remains of the later temple of Thoth, and it indicates that there had been a school attached to the New Kingdom temple.11 In 2014, this was confirmed by the find of a large stela of King Seti II of the 19th Dynasty (Fig. 31), together with the plinth upon which it once stood. It shows the king making offerings to Thoth and Horus, as well as the goddess Seshat and another unidentified male divinity. On it were four damaged lines of a painted inscription in hieroglyphs, describing building work undertaken at the orders of Seti II. The prominence of Thoth upon the stela makes it likely that the temple at Amheida was already dedicated to that deity; his title “Lord of hieroglyphs” refers to schooling. Seshat was a goddess of writing also, and Horus, the son of Osiris, refers to the concepts of childhood and succession. It therefore seems likely that the stela was set up to commemorate the building of a school at Amheida, where the national curriculum would be taught, and it is possible that the temple itself was also built or extended at this time. The ostrakon with the Kemyt text was produced in this institution. By means of such schools Seti II promoted uniformity in the training of Egyptian officials. The school text Kemyt has been found all over Egypt, wherever officials were being educated. Even in Nubia the same curriculum was practiced. Another copy of the Kemyt has been found at Kuban in Nubia, while at Amara West two ostraka with another literary school text, called “The Teaching of Amenemhat”, were found in a context dating from the 19th Dynasty. The Amheida ostrakon is also interesting because its scribe made a mistake, most likely the result of a memory lapse. In mid-sentence, our scribe suddenly introduced a phrase from an earlier section of the text—in fact not quite the same phrase, but one starting with a similarsounding word. This lapse indicates that the text must have been written 11. Kaper 2010.

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to be found. We need more investigation into Amheida’s vast cemetery and into the deep stratigraphy on the temple hill.

2.2. Textual and decorative evidence for the New Kingdom and the Third Intermediate Period Olaf E. Kaper

One of the unexpected finds among the remains of the temple was an ostrakon bearing a literary text, known as the Kemyt, which was used as a school exercise (Fig. 30). This ostrakon was found among the remains of the later temple of Thoth, and it indicates that there had been a school attached to the New Kingdom temple.11 In 2014, this was confirmed by the find of a large stela of King Seti II of the 19th Dynasty (Fig. 31), together with the plinth upon which it once stood. It shows the king making offerings to Thoth and Horus, as well as the goddess Seshat and another unidentified male divinity. On it were four damaged lines of a painted inscription in hieroglyphs, describing building work undertaken at the orders of Seti II. The prominence of Thoth upon the stela makes it likely that the temple at Amheida was already dedicated to that deity; his title “Lord of hieroglyphs” refers to schooling. Seshat was a goddess of writing also, and Horus, the son of Osiris, refers to the concepts of childhood and succession. It therefore seems likely that the stela was set up to commemorate the building of a school at Amheida, where the national curriculum would be taught, and it is possible that the temple itself was also built or extended at this time. The ostrakon with the Kemyt text was produced in this institution. By means of such schools Seti II promoted uniformity in the training of Egyptian officials. The school text Kemyt has been found all over Egypt, wherever officials were being educated. Even in Nubia the same curriculum was practiced. Another copy of the Kemyt has been found at Kuban in Nubia, while at Amara West two ostraka with another literary school text, called “The Teaching of Amenemhat”, were found in a context dating from the 19th Dynasty. The Amheida ostrakon is also interesting because its scribe made a mistake, most likely the result of a memory lapse. In mid-sentence, our scribe suddenly introduced a phrase from an earlier section of the text—in fact not quite the same phrase, but one starting with a similarsounding word. This lapse indicates that the text must have been written 11. Kaper 2010.

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Figure 30. Ostrakon with Kemyt text.

down from memory, rather than copied from a written text or from dictation, and it invites us to reassess the role of memory in scribal education. The stela and its plinth were reused in the masonry of the Romanperiod temple, and their great size and weight make it unlikely that they were brought in from far away. Therefore, the New Kingdom temple must have stood at this same location or very close to it.

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Figure 31. Stela showing Seti II making offerings to Thoth and Horus.

For further information about Amheida at this time we must turn to sources from the Nile valley. At Tell el-Amarna wine vessels that come from the Dakhla Oasis have been found. The docket of one of them mentions the “vineyards of Sawahet belonging to the domain of the Aten [the sun-god worshiped under Akhenaten].” Two further dockets mention vineyards, and seem to refer also to the same source

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for the wine.12 Moreover, the tomb of Tutankhamun contained a jar of fruit from the oasis (as interpreted by Pierre Tallet) from year ten of the reign of Akhenaten (Tallet makes this dating likely). Its source is not explicitly designated as Sawahet— it simply says “Southern Oasis” (that is, Kharga and Dakhla)—but it is possible that the fruit in question came together with the wine from the estate of the Aten at Sawahet. Sawahet’s wine industry is still attested later in the New Kingdom by another wine docket.13 The temple at Amheida was further extended under Ramesses IX, as a small piece of temple relief is dated to his reign. The excavations at Amheida have further added to our knowledge of the Third Intermediate Period. This era, which follows the New Kingdom, saw the country divided into a number of separate kingdoms ruled by kings of Libyan descent. At Amheida, the evidence from the temple of Thoth dates especially to the later part of the Libyan period, the end of the 23rd Dynasty. Under Takeloth III, a stela was erected recording a land donation to the temple in the time of the governor of Dakhla, Esdhuti (Fig. 32). The same governor is mentioned again in a stela from Mut from the reign of the Nubian king Piye. Yet fragments of two limestone stelae written in hieratic Egyptian seem to reflect activity in this temple earlier, during the 22nd Dynasty. Two fragments were found of the lunette of a hieratic stela that much resembles that of the Greater Dakhla Stela (Fig. 14).14 The growing body of epigraphic evidence from the recent excavations in Dakhla shows that the Southern Oasis was never free from Theban control. Part of the background to Theban activity in the oases was the violent incursions into the Nile valley by Libyan groups during the later years of the New Kingdom, as documented in the records from Deir el-Medina.15 The reign of Ramesses IX was especially disturbed by such incursions, which must have had their origins in the oases of the Western Desert. In this light, the recent find of temple decoration of Ramesses IX at Amheida cannot be seen as unrelated; instead, it probably forms part of a deliberate attempt by the Egyptian government to impose control over the region. These events had made it clear that the southern Western Desert could pose a threat to security. The Banishment Stela of Menkheperre16 tells us that the oases served as a place of exile for 12. Tallet 1996. 13. Lopez 1980: docket no. 57237. 14. Kaper and Demarée 2005: 34, fig. 8. 15. Haring 1992; 1993. 16. Jansen-Winkeln 2007: 72–74.

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Figure 32. Amheida hieratic stela of the 23rd Dynasty.

adversaries of the government during the 21st Dynasty, making tight control over the region even more urgent. The Greater Dakhla Stela, now in Oxford, was erected at the temple at Mut al-Kharab in the reign of Shoshenq I or perhaps Shoshenq III,17 and its text testifies to the central administration’s continuing efforts to maintain law and order in the oases. By erecting temples in Dakhla, the kings and High Priests of Amun at Thebes contributed to the stability of the oases. At the same time, we may assume that the Libyan background of the rulers of the 22nd and 23rd Dynasties caused them to look with different eyes, and perhaps a genuine interest, at the regions west of the Nile valley.

2.3. The temples of the Late Period Olaf E. Kaper

Amheida is one of the few sites in Egypt where a temple from the Late Period can be studied. Although many were built during this era throughout the country, they were almost everywhere demolished and replaced by new buildings in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. In the 17. Leahy 2010. See fig. 14 for an illustration.

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Figure 32. Amheida hieratic stela of the 23rd Dynasty.

adversaries of the government during the 21st Dynasty, making tight control over the region even more urgent. The Greater Dakhla Stela, now in Oxford, was erected at the temple at Mut al-Kharab in the reign of Shoshenq I or perhaps Shoshenq III,17 and its text testifies to the central administration’s continuing efforts to maintain law and order in the oases. By erecting temples in Dakhla, the kings and High Priests of Amun at Thebes contributed to the stability of the oases. At the same time, we may assume that the Libyan background of the rulers of the 22nd and 23rd Dynasties caused them to look with different eyes, and perhaps a genuine interest, at the regions west of the Nile valley.

2.3. The temples of the Late Period Olaf E. Kaper

Amheida is one of the few sites in Egypt where a temple from the Late Period can be studied. Although many were built during this era throughout the country, they were almost everywhere demolished and replaced by new buildings in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. In the 17. Leahy 2010. See fig. 14 for an illustration.

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Delta, where the political and religious center of the country was situated, not many monuments from antiquity survive, simply because this was also the location of the subsequent capitals Alexandria and Cairo, and obsolete stone monuments, as we have seen, were generally demolished for use as building material. The Late Period temple of Amheida suffered the same fate— demolished and its stone then reused. But owing to the subsequent disturbance of the later temple and the survival of its remains, we have the opportunity to examine every surviving stone from that temple and to reconstruct its antecedents. If we were able to take apart, for instance, the temple of Edfu, we would also learn quite a lot about the building history of that site.18 The Late Period temple at Amheida probably stood close to the site of the Roman one, because many stone blocks were reused in close proximity to others from the same original wall relief. This would not have happened if it had been necessary to transport the blocks over longer distances. A second indicator of a close location is the find of underground burials of sacred animals from the Late Period next to the remains of the Roman temple. Large numbers of votive bronzes of Osiris from the Late Period were found around here, which must also relate to this sacred cemetery. The name of the god Thoth of Setwah appears on many blocks of the Late Period. It was suggested in the introduction that the place name had changed during the reign of Amasis, who was particularly active at Amheida. Three kings of the 26th Dynasty are named in the temple reliefs: Nekau II, Psamtik II, and Amasis. Other parts were added to the temple complex under Petubastis IV and Darius I of the Persian period. The demolition and reuse of the Saite and Persian buildings in the later Roman-period temple are evident from the occurrence of gypsum mortar on the faces of most earlier reliefs. Often these blocks also display one or two roughly cut grooves across their relief faces, which may relate to the process of cutting the blocks down to size for their reuse.19 One doorway of the Late Period temple (Fig. 33) seems to have been spared in Roman times—it was found intact and reused in the town of El-Qasr, without any signs of damage. The excavations have yielded hundreds of blocks and fragments of the Late Period temples. We do not know what the temples looked like 18. A group of decorated blocks from the Late Period was found under the pavement of the forecourt of the Edfu temple in 1984; von Falck 2010. 19. Kaper and Demarée 2005: 22.

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Figure 33. A doorway from the Late Period temple, reused at El-Qasr (photo O. E. Kaper, 1990).

before this era, because the Late Period kings did not reuse any earlier reliefs in their buildings. The earliest dated fragment of temple decoration from the Saite Dynasty shows one part of the series of titles (the Horus name) of Nekau II (610–595 BCE) (Fig. 34). Only a few other relief blocks and fragments may be associated with this reign, all of which seem to derive from a single temple doorway, which he may have had erected in front of the earlier temple. The presence of Nekau II is surprising, as nationwide there are only a few extant remains of his activities as a temple patron.20 Subsequently, Psamtik (Psammetichos) II (595–589 BCE) added another doorway to the temple. Several blocks from this doorway show evidence 20. Leahy 2009: 237–40.

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Figure 34. A fragment of a temple decoration with the Horus name of Nekau II.

of reuse in the time of Amasis, so that it seems that this part of the building stood for only some sixty years at most. Under Amasis (Ahmose II, 570–526 BCE), major building work took place at Amheida; many fragments survive from the relatively large temple erected and decorated during his reign. The reconstruction of these fragments shows a temple with reliefs in different sizes and different styles of cutting. The building was entirely decorated in sunk relief that was plastered and painted, and in which the predominant color was blue. All hieroglyphs and the skin color of many gods, among them Thoth (Fig. 35), were rendered in blue. Among the blocks are two fragments of a building inscription, which may be reconstructed as follows: “The Son of Re, Lord of appearances Amasis, who lives for ever, he has made as a monument to his father Thoth [. . .].” The façade of this temple built by Amasis can be reconstructed with a high degree of certainty. It contained a sizable scene on each side of the entrance doorway. The one to the left depicted the king lifesize, facing Thoth and Nehmet-Away. The god carries the titles “Thoth the two times most great, the Lord of Setwah.” The doorway bore small-scale scenes on the jambs and the lintel. To the right of the doorway was a larger than lifesize figure of the god Seth depicted with outstretched wings and wielding a spear against the serpent Apophis. A lion accompanied the god, assisting him in the attack. A smaller and less elaborate version of

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Figure 35. The arm of Thoth holding a staff, from the temple of Amasis, showing blue coloring.

this image appears in the Persian-period temple of Hibis.21 The temple’s sanctuary seems to have been vaulted, and painted scenes were added at the top of the vault, with lifesize figures of gods shown in relief on both side walls (Fig. 36). The following gods are represented in the temple of Amasis: Thoth and Nehmet-Away, Tefnut, Hathor, Meret, Seth, Shu, Ptah, Min, and Amun, but others such as Mut will certainly also have featured. These gods are well known from the Nile valley, and it is perhaps remarkable that no specifically local deities of the oasis are represented here. Only the figure of Seth stands out, because this god had fallen out of favor by the time of the 26th Dynasty in the Nile valley, whereas he continued to function as the principal deity of Dakhla. 21. Davies 1953: pls. 42, 43.

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Figure 36. The head of Amun in a relief from the temple of Amasis.

The 2014 excavation season brought a major surprise in the form of three temple relief blocks carrying four of the five names of the titulary of Petubastis IV (Fig. 37). The find allowed us to identify two previously discovered blocks as also belonging to the same building phase. This little-known king erected a temple at Amheida, or at least he extended the existing temple building. Until now, his name had been known only from a few seal impressions and written sources from the area to the south of Memphis. The inscription sheds more light on the Persian occupation of Egypt, and on the army sent by Cambyses into the Egyptian Western Desert.22 In May 525 BCE Cambyses captured Egypt; his reign is counted as the start of the 27th Dynasty, the number given to the era when Egypt was part of the Persian Empire. There was much resistance against this foreign occupation. The last king of the previous dynasty, Psamtik III, organized a revolt in 524, according to Herodotus, which ended in his assassination. Between 522 and 520 there was a second large rebellion, this one led by Petubastis IV, who declared himself king of Egypt.23 The new evidence from Amheida shows that this ruler claimed full royal titles and that he 22. Kaper forthcoming (b). 23. Yoyotte 1972.

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Figure 37. A stone block showing the titulary of Petubastis IV.

was especially active in the southern oases. This tells us that he had a power-base in the Western Desert, and maybe specifically at Dakhla. His revolt may well have started in the oases and spread to Memphis, the capital from which the Persian satrap Aryandes ruled Egypt at the time.24 The presence of this rival king in the oases may have been the reason why Cambyses sent an army into the Western Desert, a force that never returned. Herodotus (4.26) says that this army disappeared in a desert 24. Vittmann 2011: 392.

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storm, but the new evidence suggests that it may have been sent out against the army of Petubastis, only to suffer a humiliating defeat. This defeat would have coincided with Cambyses’ failed expedition into Nubia (Kush), in which case further losses were even more painfully felt and it would have been decided to hide what had really happened. Petubastis IV managed to rule over a part of Egypt for perhaps several years, until the Persian army suppressed the rebellion. It is noticeable that Darius I, who succeeded Cambyses, managed to spend large resources— larger than anywhere else in the country—in the Southern Oasis. He built new temples for Amun-Re in Kharga: a large temple at Hibis, and a smaller one at Qasr el-Ghueita.25 The recent finds at Amheida have now added another to the list, because Darius was responsible for erecting another shrine to Thoth at the site. This may have stood next to the temple of Amasis, because both were demolished and reused together as building material during the Roman period. Only a small part of the name of Darius I has been preserved, on a single relief block from the temple. Other cartouches of this king were left blank here, as also in the temple at Hibis (Fig. 38). The relief style at Amheida closely resembles that at Hibis, making it very likely that the same group of artists worked in both places. Darius’ temple of Thoth consisted perhaps of a single large room in which rows of deities were represented on the lower register. Among these were certainly Thoth, Mut, Nephthys, Hathor, and Neferhotep. In the register above them were a series of representations of Thoth as a baboon, each set inside its own chapel. Remarkably, the walls depict the baboons in raised relief, whereas the rest of the scenes are in sunk relief (Fig. 39). The same combination of cutting styles is seen on the remains of a doorway, whose jambs are in raised relief and the relief on the adjacent wall in sunk relief. On the entrance doorway to this temple were representations of a number of gods, among them Khepri and the goddess Meret, executed on a smaller scale than those inside (Fig. 40). Darius I was responsible for minor building projects at several sites in Egypt,26 but he devoted remarkably more attention to the temples of the southern oases than to those in the rest of the country.27 The mudbrick temple at ‘Ain Manawir also dates to the 27th Dynasty, but it is 25. Darnell 2007. 26. Traunecker 1980: 209–13. 27. Chauveau and Thiers 2006: 379.

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Figure 38. Empty cartouches of Darius I.

not known from which reign.28 This intensive preoccupation with the Southern Oasis must be seen in the light of the rebellion of Petubastis IV, which can now, as we have seen, be located in the Western Desert. In order to prevent a similar insurrection occurring again from the same region, the Persian state invested heavily in the oases’ infrastructure. Among other things, the irrigation of the region was overhauled and a Persian system of subterranean aqueducts (qanats) was introduced into the Kharga and Bahariya oases. One objective of the kings who wished to control the Western Desert oases may well have been long-distance trade. The site of Qasr Allam in northern Bahariya has yielded an important storage center from the time of the 26th Dynasty.29 Trade was one of the principal interests of the Saite kings, as is shown by the foundation of Naukratis, but also by the digging of a canal to the Red Sea under Nekau II.30 This canal 28. Wuttmann et al. 1996: 393. 29. Colin 2004. 30. Lloyd 2000: 376.

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Figure 39. A baboon in raised relief from the temple of Darius.

was eventually finished under Darius I, and the development of trade routes continued under Persian rule.31 By developing the infrastructure of the oases, and by building temples, the conditions for trade through the Western Desert were improved. Agricultural produce is likely to have been one of the most important commodities in the long-distance trade of the oases with the Nile valley and its neighboring countries, but a definite identification of the nature of this trade still requires more information from other sources. The prospect of a reliable year-round water supply and continuous agriculture must have been attractive to the state, providing a significant impetus to the economic development of the Western Desert oases. Outside of Dakhla, there is no conclusive evidence to link the 31. Lloyd 1976: 135.

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40. A representation of Khepri from the entrance doorway of the temple of Darius (photo Christopher Kleihege).

construction date of the Hibis temple with the Saite Dynasty,32 even though, to judge from the length of their reigns and their known activities elsewhere in the oases, Apries or Amasis may well have conducted previous building works at the site. Otherwise, there is evidence for building works in the name of Apries and Amasis at Bahariya.33 During Amasis’ reign, economic activity intensified markedly. Temple building in this king’s name was undertaken by the governor of Bahariya, Djed-Khonsu-iuf-ankh, at ‘Ain el-Muftella.34 Amasis forced the local ruler of Siwa, Sethirdis, with the intriguing title “Chief of the Two Deserts,” to acknowledge his authority, after which the temple at Aghurmi was built and decorated in both their names.35 In Dakhla and Kharga no local governors are known at this time—in notable contrast to the oases in the north. It may be that the political system of powerful governors that was still in force at the end of the Libyan period36 had been replaced by a different system in the 26th Dynasty, of which we have not yet encountered the archaeological or textual evidence. 32. Winlock 1941: 4–7, pl. 9A ; Kaper 2012a: 174. 33. Fakhry 1950: 2–5. 34. Labrique 2004. 35. Kuhlmann 1988: 42–3; Colin 1998. 36. Kaper and Demarée 2005.

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2.4. A sacred necropolis Paola Davoli

One of the most interesting discoveries on the temple hill is a small area of 3 × 5.5 m that remained undisturbed in the digging of the pits (see §2.1). Its excavation is not yet finished, but it can be interpreted as an animal necropolis, datable probably to the Late Period. Five sealed pottery coffins (Fig. 41) have been recovered, and many other fragments of similar containers have been found scattered around the area. The coffins, of relatively poor quality, are oval (70–46 × 40–35 × height 40–21 cm), and each has a cover sealed to the container with gypsum plaster. Two of them were emptied directly in the field, because they were broken and too heavy to be removed without damaging their contents. In fact, the coffins are handmade of coarse clay, in one piece and badly fired, and thus very fragile as well as heavy. Their surfaces are whitish-coated and lack any decoration or inscription. The five recovered coffins had been buried very close to each other, and carefully deposited with a north–south orientation. According to their elevations, they can be considered as two groups of deposition: two of them were buried immediately below the other three.37 It is evident that they had been put at the bottom of pits dug for the purpose, but of these we could not see the perimeter except in the case of one coffin, for which part of a previous-period wall was cut away. So far, Salima Ikram has identified thirty-five birds, including both raptors and ibises, from examining the bones from one coffin.38 Its contents comprised hundreds of small bones and dark dust. No bandages, other wrappings, or other items have been found. These containers seem to be part of a larger animal necropolis in which birds (specifically, ibises) sacred to Thoth were interred together with raptors sacred to Horus or perhaps Amun-Re. The combination of the birds sacred to Thoth and to Horus in the same cemetery is quite common, but at Amheida there are several unusual aspects to this practice—or at least, aspects not common to the many other animal necropoleis known so far: namely, that the animals were buried in great numbers all together in one coffin and without any dedication or 37. The first group’s elevation was 147.75 m above sea level; the second group’s was 147.98 m above sea level. 38. According to S. Ikram 2012, Sacred Ibises (Threskiornis aethiopicus) and Glossy Ibises (Plegadis falcinellus), buzzards (Buteo sp.), eagle (Aquila sp.), kestrels (Falco sp.), or kites (Milvus sp.) were identified. Study of the contents of the coffins by Salima Ikram and Megan Spitzer.

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Figure 41. Pottery bird coffins shown in context.

inscription. These were certainly never the sacred living animals of the temple of Thoth. However, they cannot be compared with the votive offerings to the god from pilgrims, which were generally single mummies in single coffins, and buried in chambers together with hundreds of similar items.39 In shape and in color, these coffins resemble a gigantic egg. It is therefore certain that the burials are strictly connected with the temple and its cults; and possibly, the deposition of a considerable number of birds in one coffin40 was performed during a feast. It is also possible that the temple was equipped to produce the coffins, as they are of the same shape and technique, and in view of their fragility they cannot have travelled any distance. Further excavation in the area and analysis of the contents of the other coffins will probably clarify the meaning of these collective burials. From the same context as the coffins came a cluster of forty miniature pottery vessels and about forty-five bronze fragments of Osiris statuettes (Fig. 42) and pendants.41 The restoration of the bronzes revealed statues 39. For an overview of these necropoleis see Scalf 2012; Ikram 2012. 40. Multiple burials of mummified birds and bundles in large vessels dated to the Roman period were found at Abydos: Bailleul-LeSuer 2012: Cat. No. 30; Loat 1914: 40, pl. IV. 41. For a description of these objects see Davoli 2012b: 267. Similar bronzes have been found at ‘Ain Manawir (Kharga Oasis) in a temple dedicated to Osiris during the first Persian period: Wuttmann et al. 1996.

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Figure 42. Miniature pottery vessels from the sacred animal necropolis.

Figure 43. Bronze Osiris statuettes.

of different sizes, with inlaid eyes and gilded surfaces (Fig. 43). Among these figurines was one, made of unfired clay, that was of particular interest (Fig. 44). Osiris figurines, as ex-votos, are very common finds in animal necropoleis and in the related temples.42 The difficulty of dating them precisely via stylistic analysis is well known, and our objects are not immune to this problem. 42. Coulon 2008: 22. Some 370 statuettes were found in the temple at ‘Ain Manawir and several hoards were recovered from the Sacred Animal Necropolis at Saqqara: Wuttmann, Coulon, and Gombert 2007: 167–73; Davies 2007: 174–87.

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Figure 44. An Osiris figurine of unfired clay.

To judge from the estimated extent of the later temple, the surviving area where the coffins have been found was outside the Romanperiod sanctuary, but because of the destruction of the stratigraphy it is impossible to know if it continued under the temple. However, the concentration of coffin fragments and of the Osiris statuettes points to an area southwest of the Roman temple. The date of these coffins and of the Osiris statuettes has not been proved by radiocarbon (14C) analysis or by any inscriptions, and so is uncertain, but they could be of the Late Period or specifically of the 26th Dynasty. If this were confirmed, the cemetery would have been part of the temple complex of that dynasty, as described in the previous section.43 43. The stratigraphy also points to a period later than the New Kingdom. The erosion of the stratigraphy from the New Kingdom to the Late Roman Period prevents us from being more precise.

3 The Urban Landscape during the Roman Period 3.1. The city plan of Roman and late Roman Trimithis Paola Davoli

Trimithis is the only city of Roman Egypt for which we can recover most of the urban plan. Most other cities are concealed by modern towns on the same footprint, but in the case of Amheida only some areas of sand hide the ancient layout, down to the level of individual rooms, from our eyes. Fortunately, it has been possible to map most of the village of Kellis, allowing us to compare these two settlements. Because only a small fraction of Amheida has been excavated—and even if we spent many years on the task it would never be possible to dig all of it—a topographical survey of the site has been a major objective from the beginning, in order to allow us to understand the urban character of Trimithis. This survey started in 2001 before the excavation itself, and was completed for the habitation areas, as far as possible, in 2013. However, several parts of the plan are still blank because of the presence of a thick coat of sand covering the buildings (Fig. 45). Moreover, the area west of the city is hidden under sand dunes that move toward the south at a speed of about 7 m per year. This natural phenomenon enabled us to discover and plot a new quarter of the settlement in 2013 (Area 11) (Fig. 46). Our knowledge will grow in the future as the dunes continue to move. Magnetometry and conductivity surveys have also been carried 61

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Figure 45. Plan of Amheida.

out, but these have added little to our knowledge of the building plans, mainly because the mud bricks and the fill surrounding them do not differ significantly in magnetic properties that are the essential data captured by such surveys, and they therefore cannot be distinguished from one another.1 The vast necropolis to the south of the settlement still needs to be recorded. We proceeded with our topographical survey by cleaning the surface sand and debris from the features we intended to study, then plotting their key points with a Total Station (an electronic surveying instrument); in some flat areas we used photogrammetry too. Then we processed the collected data with the software package AutoCAD.2 1. Tatyana Smekalova and Sergey Smekalov worked in the temple area and in the settlement during the 2005 and 2006 seasons; Tomasz Herbich and David Swiech during the 2009 season. See the annual reports at: www.amheida.org. 2. The topographic survey was begun by the Museum of London team (2001–2) and contin-

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Figure 46. Plan of Area 11.

The result of this survey is a plan of all the structures and walls visible on the surface today. The plan cannot take into account the different phases of the settlement, and the degree of erosion and of sand accumulation will have varied according to eras and areas—factors that have surely determined the buildings’ different states of preservation as well as interfering with our perception of the urban layout. Different stages of erosion can be easily recognized even on the site surface today: a few buildings still stand, up to several meters high, while others have been eroded to floor level; in most cases, the degradation has reached the ground floor ceiling (§1.1). Until such time as a better, more precise date emerges through stratigraphic excavation, the dates and uses of the settlement areas and buildings can be suggested by the surface pottery. It is clear, however, that most of this surface pottery comes from the eroded walls and roofs— ued by archaeologists from the firm Ar/S Archeosistemi of Reggio Emilia (Italy). Fabrizio Pavia deserves the largest share of the credit for the completed survey.

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Figure 47. Chinking sherds used in the walls.

pottery was massively used in their construction, as the local building technique confirms (Fig. 47). We cannot tell how much older the pottery sherds reused in the masonry are than the living phase of the buildings until we proceed with a proper excavation. Pottery that was sitting on the roof at the time of abandonment will normally belong to the same period as the final occupation. According to the pottery3 and the excavation data, the buildings visible on the surface belong mainly to the fourth century. Pottery and other objects from earlier periods, which are found all over the area, show that this was the last phase of a settlement active from at least the Old Kingdom onwards. The older settlement stood possibly at the center of the present archaeological area. After centuries of stratification it formed a kom or tell, at present the central hill on top of which the successive temples of Thoth were built, culminating in the temple of the first century CE. The Roman-period temple was dismantled, probably in Ottoman times, along with several walls and buildings, to acquire construction material. A great temenos with an irregular perimeter wall originally surrounded the sacred area, which was probably entered by three gates on the east, north, and west sides. According to a virtual reconstruction of the Roman temple—based on limited evidence, it 3. See p. 38, n. 2.

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Figure 48. Area 11.

must be said—it was oriented toward the southeast. We would therefore expect there to have been a dromos, or processional street, crossing the main core of the Roman settlement in front of it. However, no traces of such a monumental street have been found on the surface among the fourth-century buildings. One would expect that the Imperial town was built around the main temple, partly in an area that is now blank on the plan because of the sand covering the slopes of the hill. Some remains of third-century dwellings and of a public bath were found in Areas 1, 2 and 11, as we shall see. Houses in Area 11 have not yet been excavated; their date is suggested on the basis of the surface pottery (Fig. 48). If the third-century date can be confirmed, this part of the settlement would have been far beyond the visible western limit of fourth-century Trimithis, and a counterpart to Area 1. At present, we cannot say whether the settlement of the early Imperial period spread all over the archaeological site, buried as it is under sand and the fourth-century city. The Roman baths (§3.2) and the temple, made of stone blocks and carefully decorated with painted bas-reliefs in the first century CE, seem to testify to a rich and sophisticated society. A coin hoard of about 860 billon coins of the first and second centuries

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Figure 49. Tetradrachms from the hoard of billon coins found in the temple area (photos Thomas Faucher).

CE (almost all tetradrachms minted in Alexandria) found in the temple area points to the same conclusion (Fig. 49). We still do not know for certain if the settlement was occupied continuously from the Old Kingdom to the end of the fourth century CE, but this is a reasonable possibility. If it was, we still cannot say how much it thrived in each of the various periods. The geography of the oasis, and the presence of good supplies of water that allowed agriculture to flourish, explain why a permanent settlement was established here. Considering the ancient sites of all periods surveyed throughout the oasis by the Dakhleh Oasis Project,4 it is hardly surprising that the western part, of which Amheida was at the center, includes several ruined sites dating from the Old Kingdom to the Islamic period. In all likelihood, Amheida stood on a major road, like today’s Darb Farafra. This ancient track approached Dakhla from the north, coming down from the escarpment just behind El-Qasr, then continued southward, possibly following the path of the modern paved road and connecting several settlements on the way to Mothis. Natural spring mounds which, as mentioned earlier, are no longer active today, are still readily visible all around the site. Although it is difficult to determine when these were productive, their large number testifies to a generally good supply of water. The huge spring mound located south of Trimithis (mentioned in the introduction) lies in the 4. Churcher and Mills 1999.

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Figure 50. A view of the necropolis.

vicinity of the necropolis, its outlet toward the north (see figure 12). The cemetery spreads over a flat area 1.5 km long and is characterized by a concentration of tombs, situated especially on mounds and natural hills. Traces of channels and springs invite us to suppose that the tombs used to be interspersed among cultivated fields (Fig. 50). The visible buildings in the city cover an area of about 700 × 650 m (roughly half a square kilometer, or about 45 hectares), forming an open settlement without defensive or perimeter walls. Taking parts now under sand into account, the area in ancient times was no doubt larger, although we cannot tell how much was occupied during each period. As we have seen, mud brick was the main construction material used in Trimithis, but some buildings also used baked brick, like the thermae in Area 2 and a possible second bath to the west of the temple, of which only dumped debris is visible. Baked bricks, squared stones, and wood were probably in more frequent use than we can appreciate today, but they were massively plundered for building material for new settlements during the site’s long abandonment. The settlement of the late Roman period, as far as we can tell, was oriented north–south and built on irregular-surfaced cemented dunes, no longer moving south, that formed an irregular surface, with both a

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continuous slope around the temple hill and several small elongated hills separated by depressions (Fig. 51). The geomorphology here will have influenced the layout of the settlement, in which some groups of houses and streets follow a different orientation from the dominant one—such as, for example, Area 1, with its Street 1 oriented northeast–southwest. Similarly, some streets and alleys follow a curvilinear path, caused by a change in the slope or following a natural terrace, while others cut across the slope abruptly. Terraces artificially supported by substructures and walls belonging to buildings were used at least on the slopes of the central temple hill, where dense habitation quarters and large buildings have been documented, especially on the east and south slopes. Containment walls clearly mark the south end of the settlement, where a steep step separates the habitations from the south necropolis (Fig. 52). Hundreds of alleys, often very narrow, connect the buildings, showing a seemingly confused network. The layout is very dense, and from the surface it is not everywhere obvious where the alleys are or where they lead (Fig. 53). At times, the network of walls seems to close off every possible passageway, in a sort of labyrinth. The most regular buildings, aligned on orthogonal streets, are in the center of Area 2 east of the temple, and in Area 11. But the widest street, Street 1 in Area 1, has a completely different orientation from the others, and appears to be isolated or at least not directly linked to other streets (Fig. 54). Its considerable width (7 m) suggests that it was the most important road, but it ends abruptly, and the buildings on both sides are ordinary houses of the third century CE. Pottery kilns with dumps and masses of clay are concentrated in this area.5 There are no visible through streets in the settlement: only one north–south-oriented street can be described as a long thoroughfare, but it is formed by at least two segments, of which the southern one seems to be an irregular extension of the first. Certainly, it cannot be considered a major highway (Fig. 55). The roads are of varying widths, from a maximum of 7 m to as little as 1.5. Their edges, formed by the irregular alignment of buildings, also feature sudden variations in width. The most regular pattern is in Area 11, where the streets seem, in contrast to other areas, to have been built on level ground on a grid: they are orthogonal, compass-oriented and hierarchical, the inner roads being 2.3 m wide and the main ones about double that size (4.8 and 5.5 m). Only two alleys have been excavated in Area 2, those flanking the house of Serenos (see §3.3) to the east and west. They look like private 5. Hope 1980: 307ff.

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Figure 51. Panoramic view of the center of Trimithis.

Figure 52. The step dividing the habitations from the south necropolis.

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Figure 53. Detailed plan of the habitation area.

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Figure 54. Plan of Area 1.

Figure 55. Central north–south street.

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Figure 56. Reconstruction of the partly covered Trimithis Street 3 (S. Prell).

passages, closed at one end by walls, and with gates that seem to separate the “properties” and serve to regulate the comings and goings or to offer protection. Moreover, these alleys turned out on investigation to be partially covered with flat roofs made of palm beams, or in one case partly with a mud-brick barrel vault. The spaces in front of the doors in the streets were left uncovered, so as to allow the light to enter the houses (Fig. 56).6 The center of Trimithis was densely inhabited, with a considerable number of rich and complex buildings: some have wide, columned halls, while many others are laid out on a plan characterized by the presence 6. This system is typical of the medieval and Ottoman towns in Dakhla. Based on this parallel, we can offer the hypothesis that the vault covering the south end of Street 3 was built to support an extension or a second-floor passage between two buildings on either side of the alley: Balbo 2006.

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Figure 57. A hall with two pillars.

of two massive pillars. We can tentatively interpret these double-pillared halls as banqueting rooms, if we compare them with the stibadium “hall” found in Street 2 in front of Serenos’ house (Fig. 57). It is interesting to note that most of these halls have a north–south orientation, a rectangular shape, and the same average dimensions.7 They seem to point to a particular kind of dining culture in wealthy houses of Trimithis’ final period. From the walls that we can see it appears that the houses had different plans and dimensions, and that most streets and alleys were closed with doors, like Streets 2 and 3. Presumably they were also covered, at least in part.8 Several buildings are painted in classical style, and some have decorative appliqué in molded stucco. Although the plans of the buildings, as far as we are able to detect them, are not well 7. Contrary to the practice in other regions of the empire, the stibadium hall was not provided with an apse, as we see in Street 2, and also at Kellis: Room 7 in House 1. (http://artsonline. monash.edu.au/ancient-kellis/houses-1-2-and-3/); Ellis 1995. 8. This system of covered and closed streets is characteristic of the medieval towns and villages in oases such as El-Qasr and Balat: Balbo 2006. It must have originated in the late Roman and Byzantine urbanism of the Middle East and North Africa, and is certainly attributable to climatic and security constraints. A similar layout can be seen at Kafr Samir, a Byzantine village in Israel: Yeivin and Finkelsztejn 2008: 186–7.

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Figure 58. A stairway in the house of Serenos (B1).

Figure 59. Pottery kilns in Area 1.

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defined, we know that alongside the wide, wealthy ones, the commonest houses were originally built on a square plan, apparently following two principal standard dimensions—about 15 × 15 and 11 × 10 m. These correspond to the average dimensions of B1 and B2, respectively the house of Serenos and a house excavated in Area 1.9 However, it is also clear that buildings changed their original regular shapes by the addition of rooms, extending into nearby spaces, or by annexing rooms of adjacent buildings, as happened in Serenos’ house (§3.3). This practice was facilitated by the fact that the buildings were not freestanding but had party walls. This way of building permits the saving of goodly quantities of bricks and labor and contributes to creating the impression of a labyrinthine network of walls and rooms. The commonest kind of ceiling was the vault, but domes were used in the main square rooms, and wooden beams covered with palm branches were also employed to roof some rooms. Most of the houses have a staircase leading to upper floors or to a terraced roof (Fig. 58). Few of the visible buildings show clearly the presence of a second story, but this does not necessarily mean that they did not exist. In fourth-century Trimithis, as in Kellis, there must have been churches and other public buildings. So far only one church (B7 in Area 2.3) has been excavated (§6.1), on top of a low hill dominating the central part of the city, just in front of the temple hill. There seems to be a second church in the cemetery area southwest of the city. Two main areas of workshops have been identified so far, both on the city’s eastern fringe. One, containing several pottery kilns and a mound of clay, is in Area 1 (Fig. 59); the second is west of the standing pyramid, in a low area characterized by points with high magnetic readings, charcoal, and glassy slag, pointing to the byproducts of combustion in the course of craft activity. The Roman-period tombs are not concentrated only in the south necropolis; others were built grouped together on a hill at the east margin of the archaeological site, around a mud-brick pyramid (Area 3); at least one, towerlike, tomb (Fig. 60) is to be seen north of Trimithis, very close to the modern village.10 The far south end of the necropolis is marked by another mud-brick pyramid of Roman times. Built on hills, these two pyramids and the tower dominated the landscape, forming 9. Boozer et al. 2015. 10. The pyramid in Area 3 and the tower were consolidated by Nicholas Warner in 2006–7 and 2008: see Warner 2012.

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Figure 60. A tomb in tower form, north of Trimithis (before restoration).

landmarks for people passing by. The positions of these monumental tombs suggest that, following a well-known Roman tradition, they were constructed along roads—or, as in this case, tracks. The tombs and the related chapels are in mud brick, sometimes white-plastered and painted with Egyptian-style scenes.

3.2. The baths of Trimithis Paola Davoli

Trimithis of the Imperial period before the fourth century is so far largely unknown to us, given the thick coat of sand that covers parts of the archaeological area and the relatively small part of the city excavated so far. However, the data collected via the topographic and ceramic surveys suggest that the settlement was extensive and quite rich; the amphoras found include imports from the eastern Mediterranean.11 Third-century houses have been identified in Areas 1 and 11, and an impressive, Romanstyle public bath has been found in Area 2, below the fourth-century buildings. This last was an unexpected find, as regards both the nature of the building and its huge dimensions (approximately 41 × 34 m). 11. Caputo 2014.

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Figure 60. A tomb in tower form, north of Trimithis (before restoration).

landmarks for people passing by. The positions of these monumental tombs suggest that, following a well-known Roman tradition, they were constructed along roads—or, as in this case, tracks. The tombs and the related chapels are in mud brick, sometimes white-plastered and painted with Egyptian-style scenes.

3.2. The baths of Trimithis Paola Davoli

Trimithis of the Imperial period before the fourth century is so far largely unknown to us, given the thick coat of sand that covers parts of the archaeological area and the relatively small part of the city excavated so far. However, the data collected via the topographic and ceramic surveys suggest that the settlement was extensive and quite rich; the amphoras found include imports from the eastern Mediterranean.11 Third-century houses have been identified in Areas 1 and 11, and an impressive, Romanstyle public bath has been found in Area 2, below the fourth-century buildings. This last was an unexpected find, as regards both the nature of the building and its huge dimensions (approximately 41 × 34 m). 11. Caputo 2014.

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The first vestiges of the public bath, or thermae, were discovered during the 2007 season, and its exploration is not yet completed. The area excavated so far is approximately 1000 m2 and includes Serenos’ house (B1), a school of Greek subsequently transformed into a workshop/ stable (B5; see Chapter 6), and an imposing edifice with a peristyle hall (B6)—the building that turned out to be the last form of the public bath. These structures were active during the fourth century and were abandoned, presumably, well before the end of that century. They were built at least partly on the ruins of the earlier Roman bath, which itself was built directly on the natural cemented dune. We still have no precise evidence for dating the foundation of this bath, which was abandoned, in all likelihood, no later than the end of the third century. What we have found are the remains of rooms, walls, channels, and floors that survived after years of abandonment and demolition and were then hidden or reused as foundations for the new buildings; plus other rooms that were renovated to become a new smaller bath in the second half of the fourth century (B6). The stratigraphic excavation of the area brought us to the conclusion that after its abandonment the bath was extensively quarried for building materials and at the same time used as a dumping space (Fig. 61). The original date and extent of the Trimithis thermae are still to be determined with any precision, but we can state with a good degree of certainty that the thermal complex was public and covered probably some 1,394 m2, a substantial part of which is still to be excavated. The bath was built with baked and unbaked bricks; stones were also used at some points, as well as wood (Fig. 62). The water used in the bath came probably from a well situated a few meters to the southeast, which would have been equipped with a lifting machine (saqia).12 The underground sewer system has been partly detected; using two different networks, it conveyed the wastewater to the north of the bath. The thermae saw at least three building phases, including at least one important renovation, during which some rooms were demolished and rebuilt and new ones added. Its uneven state of preservation and the limited possibility of investigation because of the presence of other buildings on top of its ruins do not so far permit us a precise view or a 12. Present-day wells in the oasis typically produce water as warm as 38 degrees C. How this compares to ancient wells we cannot know, but the presence of the boiler in B6 shows that water had to be heated.

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Figure 61. Plan of the Roman baths.

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Figure 62. Central pillared hall and bathing area of the Late Roman baths (B6).

coherent virtual reconstruction of its phases. In all, twenty-three rooms or parts of rooms and pools have been identified, but in many cases we do not know their functions. The Imperial-period bath was half demolished and leveled after decades of abandonment, and it was on its ruins that Serenos’ house and a school were built. The north half of the building, rebuilt as the new, smaller bath mentioned above, was characterized by a central pillared room (B6) (Fig. 63). This last bathhouse (second half of the fourth century CE) was divided into two main parts: in the west part were cold and dry rooms, of which the two central ones were provided with benches (Rooms 24 and 26); in the east part were two hot rooms (caldaria) with hypocausts and two pools, one square (Room 38) and one round (Room 39), with hot water. The bathers could come into the building through any of three entrances located on the west and north streets. Then they had to pass through the entrance rooms (vestibula) and enter the main pillared hall, Room 24 (the frigidarium) (Fig. 65). To take a proper bath they had to cross the small Room 32, probably a tepidarium. A first hot room (Room 42) with a single bathtub was connected with the main bathing room, in which were two hot pools. These two pools had thick walls to keep the water hot as long as possible and were accessed from one of the caldaria (Room 40) by means

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Figure 63. Plan of the final form of the baths (B6).

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of limestone steps. The round pool (1.7 m in diameter) has a bench in it, and the water could have reached a maximum depth of 1.25 m from the bench to the floor, which is now missing. The square pool (about 2.5 × 2 m) was surrounded by a sidewalk of limestone slabs and reached a depth of about one meter. Both pools served as full-immersion baths for a small number of people at a time; the water was kept clean by constant exchange, thanks to drains for the wastewater located at the bottom. The furnace (Room 41) that heated the air and the water partially survived after extensive plundering of the baked bricks of which it was made. The water was originally heated by means of a metal boiler, from which a series of metal pipes (now also removed) carried the water to the pools. At the end of their bath, the bathers had to follow the same path they had entered by, bringing them back to the pillared Room 24. They could make use of a latrine, a small square room (Room 33, 2.8 × 2.2 m), still well preserved to a height of 3 m and provided with two high, sloping windows on the east and west walls (Fig. 64). For privacy, the door of the latrina opened at the end of a narrow, blind corridor. The latrina’s floor is missing, probably because it was made of wood, of which traces survive on the walls. The toilet seats were probably of a squat type set into the wooden floor. Water cleaned the toilet by flushing it through four channels along the perimeter of the room, and the outflow ran into a sewer channel toward the north; its destination and use are unknown. This new bath (B6) was abruptly abandoned during renovation works, before it was decorated: a mosaic of white, black, red, yellow, and reddish tesserae was planned for one of the main rooms but was never realized. Some 20,500 stone and pottery tesserae were found stored, with others still to be cut, inside Room 30. Of the southern side of the Imperial-period bath few features are well preserved; one exception is a laconicum, a round room heated by means of a hypocaust. A furnace to heat the air for the hypocaust was situated below Serenos’ house but is now missing. This laconicum, or dry sweat room, was constructed in mud brick and measured 4.3 m in diameter.13 The hypocaust, built directly into the natural cemented sand, consists of a mud-brick perimeter wall and eighteen baked-brick pillars set on a mud-brick floor. The channel that conveyed hot air enters the hypocaust from the south and was directly connected to two chimneys 13. A similar round room was found to the east in 2009, but has not yet been excavated.

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Figure 64. The latrine in the baths.

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Figure 65. Room 24.

outside the room to its south (Fig. 66). These were managed as needed, the pipes being opened and closed by the attendants outside the bath at a spot where bathers did not pass. Four additional excavated channels conveyed the air from the hypocaust toward the outside by means of four round pottery tubuli inserted into the wall of the round room. The suspended floor of the laconicum was quite thin, made as it was of tiles and white plaster to a thickness of at most 8 cm, compared to the usual 20 or more. Probably for this reason, the floor was relaid with wooden planks fixed with iron nails to crossbeams, set on a series of mud and baked bricks within a mud layer 10 cm thick. Due to the humid conditions here, only the nails and the impressions of the planks have survived. The laconicum is so far the most distinctive room in the Trimithis thermae and the only one of this kind found so far in Egypt.14 West of the laconicum we found another two rooms: another latrina and a pool. The seating system and the floor of the latrina (about 3.60 × 3.65 m) are completely missing—probably because they were made of sandstone slabs that were reused elsewhere—but the central platform and the surrounding four channels for flushing are well preserved. Water already used for bathing would have flowed into the channels from two side-rooms through two openings in the walls, then circulated counter14. I would like to warmly thank Bérangère Redon for her suggestions and for having discussed with me different aspects of this bath, sharing information with great generosity.

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Figure 66. The laconicum.

Figure 67. A column base from the first phase of the baths.

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clockwise to be drained through an underground sewer channel opening in the northeast corner of the latrina. The room to the west is preserved only at floor level and was used as foundations of Room 15 in Building 5. It was rectangular and oriented north–south (its preserved dimensions are 1.60 m east–west × 3.30 m north–south), and in its northeast corner a drain funneled the water into the latrina. The walls and the floor were made of baked brick. Below Room 19 was a wide room from which drain water flowed southward into the latrina through a channel and a hole placed at floor level. The irregular baked-brick floor extends below Rooms 19 and 21 in B5, covering an expanse of at least 7 × 8 m. A square pedestal supported a labrum, a wide stone water basin, found broken on the floor, while a raised baked-brick platform (3.10 × 3.40 m) stood at the room’s northeast corner. Although it was buried and covered by later features after having being partly demolished, it is still possible to reconstruct its shape and function: at its center was a sunken basin (2.35 × 2.15 m) or tub made of waterproof plaster. The basin was about one meter deep, had rounded corners and three rounded steps in its northwest corner, to allow for gradual immersion into the water, which was probably supplied by hand. In fact, no pipes have been found around it. This wide room with the bathtub and the labrum belongs to the second phase of the thermae. In fact, its floor covers earlier features, of which only part of a column base and of its contemporary floor have been brought to light. The column was made of clay and gypsum and was plastered with white mortar painted dark red (Fig. 67). The original floor is covered with a fine, smooth, pinkish, waterproof plaster. Apparently the room was not heated; it may have been a frigidarium, with coldwater basins. So far, we can suppose that at first a bathhouse with one or two round rooms, a stepped piscina, and a hall or a porch with painted columns occupied the area—in which case we can argue that the second building phase of the thermae was not a simple restoration, but a substantial restyling of the building, which was enlarged to the west and north. The considerable size of the bath along with this important restyling and enlargement work, done in the Imperial period, allow us to imagine a rich and sophisticated society living in the third-century oasis. This chronology is also suggested by the widely held view that baths with hypocausts are rare in first-century Egypt, and that this technology started to spread, slowly, only from the second century on. Despite a

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drastic reduction in dimensions during the second half of the fourth century when B6 was constructed—a phenomenon common at that time—the bath was intended to be a richly decorated building, with its columned porches, pillars, and at least a mosaic floor. No inscriptions have been found so far to indicate who financed the construction, renovations, and maintenance of the bath. We will probably learn more about the community that it served when we are able to compare this bath with the one discovered in Area A at Kellis, but not yet excavated.15

3.3 Two houses

Paola Davoli and Roger S. Bagnall So far, two houses have been completely excavated by the project team.16 They are in two different areas: the structure we have called the house of Serenos (B1) lies in a dense, central inhabited quarter (Area 2) characterized by the presence of large and opulent buildings, while B2 is part of a northeast quarter built on top of a hill (Area 1) and marked by the reuse of some spaces for pottery workshops in the fourth century CE. These two houses certainly belonged to people of different social statuses, but their different states of preservation limit the precision of our comparison. In effect, B2 has been deeply eroded and is preserved to a maximum height of 80 cm above floor level, while B1 is preserved up to the springing of the vaulted ceilings.17 Both houses are built with the same technique and materials, like mud brick, mud plaster for the floors and some of the walls, thin gypsum plaster, and a modest quantity of wood and palm branches. Their dates are also different: B1 was built around 330–340, while B2 seems to belong to the middle or third quarter of the third century CE and was abandoned perhaps a half-century before B1.18 15. See the report at: http://arts.monash.edu.au/archaeology/excavations/dakhleh/ismant-elkharab/areaa/bath-house.php. 16. The excavation of the house of Serenos started in 2004 and ended in 2007. The excavation of B2 started in 2005 and ended in 2006; work in Area 1 was resumed from 2012 under the direction of Anna Boozer. See Boozer et al. 2015 for a complete description of B2. 17. Besides other considerations, this means that the preserved stratigraphy of B2 is very close to the surface and thus more affected by contamination and destruction. 18. Boozer 2010: 153.

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drastic reduction in dimensions during the second half of the fourth century when B6 was constructed—a phenomenon common at that time—the bath was intended to be a richly decorated building, with its columned porches, pillars, and at least a mosaic floor. No inscriptions have been found so far to indicate who financed the construction, renovations, and maintenance of the bath. We will probably learn more about the community that it served when we are able to compare this bath with the one discovered in Area A at Kellis, but not yet excavated.15

3.3 Two houses

Paola Davoli and Roger S. Bagnall So far, two houses have been completely excavated by the project team.16 They are in two different areas: the structure we have called the house of Serenos (B1) lies in a dense, central inhabited quarter (Area 2) characterized by the presence of large and opulent buildings, while B2 is part of a northeast quarter built on top of a hill (Area 1) and marked by the reuse of some spaces for pottery workshops in the fourth century CE. These two houses certainly belonged to people of different social statuses, but their different states of preservation limit the precision of our comparison. In effect, B2 has been deeply eroded and is preserved to a maximum height of 80 cm above floor level, while B1 is preserved up to the springing of the vaulted ceilings.17 Both houses are built with the same technique and materials, like mud brick, mud plaster for the floors and some of the walls, thin gypsum plaster, and a modest quantity of wood and palm branches. Their dates are also different: B1 was built around 330–340, while B2 seems to belong to the middle or third quarter of the third century CE and was abandoned perhaps a half-century before B1.18 15. See the report at: http://arts.monash.edu.au/archaeology/excavations/dakhleh/ismant-elkharab/areaa/bath-house.php. 16. The excavation of the house of Serenos started in 2004 and ended in 2007. The excavation of B2 started in 2005 and ended in 2006; work in Area 1 was resumed from 2012 under the direction of Anna Boozer. See Boozer et al. 2015 for a complete description of B2. 17. Besides other considerations, this means that the preserved stratigraphy of B2 is very close to the surface and thus more affected by contamination and destruction. 18. Boozer 2010: 153.

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B1, to a much greater degree than B2, yielded a very considerable quantity of texts and objects that, together with the general architectural and decorative context, give us a better glimpse of the economic and family life of the occupants. Serenos, the central figure in the ostraka found in the occupation levels of this mud-brick house, is the name of its owner. The building has been well known since the Dakhleh Oasis Project survey discovered its decoration, comprising brightly colored painted scenes, in 1979. The original plan of the house (15 × 15 m) is not substantially different from that of B2: a central room gave access to the other rooms and to the staircase that leads to a second floor or a terraced roof (Figs. 58, 68). The main differences in the plan are the presence in Serenos’ house of a dining room covered by a dome and of three entrances from the streets that flanked the building to the east and west. Most of the rooms were barrel-vaulted, while the hub of the house (Room 2) and Room 6 were flat-roofed. Although B1 is better preserved than B2, thanks to a rapid covering by sand, the house suffered from moisture and termites, which damaged the mud plaster, rich in straw, and all the other organic items and remains. As already stated (§3.2), B1 was constructed together with other buildings in an area previously occupied by a Roman-style public bath that had been partly demolished to suit the needs of new buildings on the site and partly reused in the foundations of these new buildings. Baked bricks were reused, too, but only in moderate quantity in Serenos’ house.19 The objects found above and below floors as well as the stratigraphy suggest that after the house was built (around or not long after 330), it was modified or restored in two subsequent phases, until it was definitely abandoned around or soon after 365. The lifespan of this house seems very short, but we have no evidence from phases of occupation beyond these dates, and all earlier material belongs to the dumped debris used in site preparation. The first-phase house was square, with eleven rooms and three entrances. Two of them opened onto Street 2 to the east and were probably secondary entrances; one of these, in the south corner, seems to have had something to do with the function—unknown—of Room 6, perhaps a reception room for estate dependents. The west entrance was certainly the main one, despite the narrow street it opened on to, with a double-leaf door and a painted side-room (Room 13). The hub of B1, 19. Mainly they were used in the steps, to make them more resistant to wear.

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Figure 68. Plan of the house of Serenos (B1).

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Room 2, was painted in red and yellow ochre on mud plaster; the first decoration of Room 1 was painted on white plaster, now visible only in a few spots below a newer layer of painting; and Rooms 11, 13, and 14 were painted as well. In a second phase,20 which seems to have occurred a few years later, the house underwent a series of substantial alterations: some doors were walled up, starting with the entrance door into Room 6 from Street 2. Just in front of it a mud-brick stibadium (a C-shaped dining platform) was built, and the street was transformed into a sort of covered private passage or courtyard (Fig. 69).21 The door between Rooms 8 and 4 was closed, and a new door was opened between Room 7 (the east entrance room) and Room 8. Room 2 was replastered with simple mud, and Room 1 was replastered and repainted with figural scenes (§7.2); some of the floors were repaired with a new mud layer. The extension of the house northward into Room 15 and into a courtyard (Rooms 9–10) probably dates to this phase: the school built north of Serenos’ house and contemporary to it was closed, and its space changed its function completely, becoming a stable for Serenos’ animals (Figs. 70–71). Walls were demolished, and the floor gradually rose with waste and rubble to cover the previous school benches. The rhetoric schoolroom (Room 15) became a sort of storage magazine connected with the house through a new door and a corridor under the staircase. The room was equipped with a suspended wooden floor, perhaps to create a double space for storage vessels—found broken in great quantity on the ground—and to provide a drier area for food storage (Fig. 72). The upper space was reached by means of a newly built stair. In the open-air courtyard (Rooms 9 and 10) just mentioned— not directly connected with the living spaces—mangers were built. Its door, located in the northeast corner, was walled up at a certain point, and the courtyard became a dumping ground. The stable, Building 5, was accessible through a door opening onto the east street. This street (Street 2) underwent some changes too: a large door was built to close its passageway to the north and probably to separate the residential side 20. It is possible that something like an earthquake occurred at this time. Some damage to the walls and some collapses are readily visible in all the excavated buildings of this area (B1, B5 and B6). Restoration and shiftings of walls in B1 can be seen in Rooms 6, 11, 13, and 14. This damage could have caused the repainting of Room 1 and the demolition of the school along with its reshaping into a service area. 21. This kind of triclinium is common in the fourth-century Dakhla and Kharga oases. At Kellis in House 1, two stibadia were built in Room 7, one in front of the other: Hope, forthcoming: fig. 11 and pl. 4. For Kharga see Reddé 2004: 56–7, figs. 51–8.

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Figure 69. The stibadium outside the house of Serenos.

of the house from the stable. The space in front of Serenos’ house was covered with a flat roof—a common feature of the medieval settlements of the Western Desert oases— most probably to protect from the weather and the sand. The flat roof, made of palm beams, did not cover the entrance to the house. Two pillars separated the open-air space from the covered one, where a north-oriented stibadium was built. This dining space had a short life, and the stibadium was soon demolished and its lower part covered with new mud paving. In a third phase, the house underwent a sort of restoration: some floors were replastered, others replaced,22 and bands of whitewash were applied in some rooms around niches and doors and on several walls, in some cases concealing the painted decorations. Bins, apparently for storage, were built inside Room 13 (Fig. 73), and a small cooking hearth was made with a few mud bricks in Room 4, immediately in front of the door. The smoke made by the fire would have flowed into the central Room 2 and escaped through two small vertical windows. This last phase of the life of Serenos’ house seems to show less sophistication and taste than the previous ones. 22. The mud floor in Room 1 was probably replaced with a new one after 355 ce, as suggested by the presence of a coin under the latter floor (inv. 11324). Coins from inside the upper floor (F150) found in Room 13 confirm this date. Another coin (inv. 136), from the surface of the second floor in Room 4, also confirms the date of the renewal of the pavements.

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Figure 70. A chicken coop in the north extension of Serenos’ house.

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Figure 71. Feed troughs in the north extension of Serenos’ house.

Figure 72. House B1, Room 15 and its reconstruction with a suspended wooden floor (B. Bazzani).

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Figure 73. House B1, storage bins in Room 13.

Room 2 of Serenos’ house was flat-roofed (Fig. 74), with light coming in from the two entrances and from four small vertical windows, three openings in the ceiling above the doors and the other above a niche on the west wall. Clearly, above Room 2 was an open-air space, probably a roof terrace. There was probably also an open space above the dome in Room 1: it has been supposed that the light entered this room through a central oculus in the dome, but we found no evidence to prove or disprove this hypothesis. The ventilation and the light sources in the house were otherwise limited to small, high openings that were feasible only in some of the ceilings (as in Rooms 1 and 2) and high in the walls of the rooms on the east and west sides. To the north and south the house shared the perimeter walls with two other buildings—respectively, the school/stable (B4/5), and another house built on the same plan but not yet extensively excavated (B8). Only Room 3 in this twin house has in fact been excavated so far, but a complete exploration is planned. These houses seem to be the only two in Trimithis with the same plan and dimensions. A complete study of them will, it is hoped, disclose whether the reasons for this coincidence

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Figure 74. House B1, Room 2 (replica 2010).

Figure 75. Ring from the house of Serenos.

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are due to a family connection. However, at some stage barriers were built in the two streets connecting the buildings, to prevent through passage in Street 2 and to regulate it in Street 3. Relations between the families, if relations there were, must have soured, or perhaps one of the houses passed into someone else’s hands. Few of the organic materials in the house of Serenos, including the wooden doors, the shelves, the furniture, and the degradable waste, were preserved. Probably some of these items were removed after the house was abandoned, to be reused elsewhere, but others decayed naturally because of the high humidity. Just a few objects were left behind—such as bronze rings, one gold ring, bone hairpins, glass bracelets and beads, and some bronze coins (Fig. 75). Several ostraka provide the name and illuminate the business activities of the owner, but they give us little information about members of the family. Some of these ostraka were found scattered on the floor in Room 2, close to a cupboard in the southwest wall. Two rectangular and quite spacious cupboards built in recesses in the walls were found in this room, each with two shelves. It is possible that originally the ostraka and other objects were stored there. A vessel included in the wall of one of them was found to be empty. Without furniture, we cannot know precisely the functions of these rooms, if indeed they had fixed uses. We can, however, explore some hypotheses. The most important was Room 1, with a square plan and rich painted decoration (Fig. 76). There were three small niches on the north, east, and south walls; the last one disappeared with the collapse of the wall, but fragments of plaster decoration suggest it was used for a domestic cult. The room itself was probably used for banquets, as is also suggested by the figural scenes; it was accessed by a double-leaf wooden door that opened in the middle of the north wall. Two other painted but smaller rooms (11 and 14) connect with Room 1. These three together form a sort of separate space accessible only through the door between Rooms 1 and 2. Most probably it was used as a reception space, probably for eating, but no furniture, built either in wood or mud brick, nor even traces of their presence on the floors, have been found to confirm this function.23 Only a great quantity of chicken bones was found in Room 14 above the last floor level; these may be indications of a banquet, or at least of eating. 23. Room functions probably changed with the seasons, the times of day, and for different occasions: Allison 2001: 192.

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Figure 76. House B1, Room 1.

Figure 77. House B1, Room 4.

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Figure 78. Lamps from the treasure found below the floor of Room 4.

Rooms 4 and 8 were possibly service spaces, but, apart from a small and unimpressive hearth and pockets of ashes, there were no cooking facilities. No proper kitchen with bread oven, storage, or other cooking equipment has been found in this house or in its courtyard, so it is possible that the cooking area was located on the roof or in a room on the upper floor.24 Room 4 also concealed a treasure comprising bronze objects (Fig. 77). Two lamps, a round box, and a knife with a bone handle were hidden below the floor, near the entrance (Fig. 78). A possible second treasure was a collection of more than thirty bronze coins, found scattered at floor level. A great number of Greek ostraka, fragments of glass vessels, and gypsum stoppers were also found in this room, but some of them came from the collapse of the roof or an upper story. The compacted mud floor, several layers thick, had been completely destroyed by the weight of the collapsed vault. During the three phases of the house, it is possible that at least some of the rooms changed their function. What we found on the last floor must therefore be connected with the last living phase or with the abandonment of the house. Moreover, we have to consider the possibility 24. In the houses at Kellis, kitchens were situated in external courtyards, but bins were found also on the second story: Hope, forthcoming.

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that squatters used the rooms before they were totally filled up by sand.25 Coins were found in all rooms but in particular concentrations in Rooms 4, 8, and 14, scattered on the last-phase floors. Ostraka are also common finds in Serenos’ house, particularly on the floor of Room 2 and under those of Rooms 4 and 8, in debris dumped before construction.26 There were coins as well as ostraka inside Rooms 4 and 8, the two rooms that look like service spaces, with their rough floors, scattered pockets of ashes, and white bands painted on the walls. The function of room 6 is puzzling, because during the first phase of the house it had an opening onto Street 2: three steps in baked bricks descending into the room were constructed, together with the first mud floor and a shallow bench (width 34 cm, height about 25 cm), also made of baked bricks, directly connected with the steps and running along the south wall of the room (Fig. 79). These features seem to suggest that Room 6—at 7.19 × 3.64 m, the biggest in the house—may have originally had a public or semipublic function linked to the street. The walling-up of the door, probably in connection with the construction of the stibadium just in front of it in Street 2, changed the function of the room, or reflected such a change, but no evidence has been found that can give us any inkling of what the new use was. The only other decorated space was Room 13, directly accessible from the entrance room (vestibulum) 12, on Street 3. Room 13 was decorated with panels painted on a purple ground and separated by stylized palmettes; the central decorative motifs, apparently inscribed with the names of gods such as Hephaistos and Polydeukes, have now almost entirely vanished.27 Its original function was possibly connected with Room 12 and thus with the household’s interaction with the outside world. It seems that the family’s bedrooms were not on the ground floor, where the most private rooms are the painted ones—Rooms 1, 11, and 14—which were probably used for dining with guests. However, multiple functions are possible, especially given movable furniture. Five minutes’ walk from the house of Serenos lies a district that we call Area 1, with smaller houses. One of these, our house B2, was excavated by Anna Boozer, and her and her colleagues’ findings have 25. Fire traces were found on the floor and walls in the entrance to Room 12. 26. Ast and Davoli, forthcoming. 27. Cribiore and Davoli 2013.

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Figure 79. House B1, a view of Room 6 (replica 2010).

just been published (Fig. 80).28 In a number of respects the two houses differ substantially, B2 providing a significant contrast to the upperstratum culture of Serenos’ house. This is not, however, because B2 was occupied by a lower-class family; it covers about 120 m2, is situated on a main street, and was probably the home of someone in mid-level estate management or in transportation. House B2 has an almost square plan (11.6 × 10.7 m) and is flanked by a courtyard to the south that may belong to another house (Fig. 81). B2 has ten rooms, of which one is a staircase leading to the second floor or to a terraced roof, and two are small cellars under the stairs. The floors are preserved only in the west half of the house. The entrance to the building is in its northwest corner. It opened directly onto Street 1, the largest thoroughfare of Trimithis. A small entrance room connects directly with a central one, Room 7, that connected with all the other rooms. It functioned as a kitchen: a bread oven and a covered storage bin are built against the north wall (Fig. 82). As in other ancient domestic contexts, the rooms were probably multi-functional:29 a small hearth, 28. Boozer et al. 2015. 29. See at least Bergmann 2012.

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Figure 80. An aerial view of House B2.

Figure 81. Plan of House B2.

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Figure 82. House B2, an unexplained feature in kitchen and the oven.

hand-molded in mud, is to be seen on the floor of Room 5, and a storage space with two jars was found under the floor in Room 6 (Fig. 83). Loom weights found inside the house and in the courtyard suggest that a domestic vertical loom was in use here. Besides the common-ware pottery vessels, other objects have been discovered such as fragments of glass vessels, and items of personal adornment—silver- and gold-glass beads, glass and faience beads, an Egyptian amulet (Bes), glass bracelets, bronze rings, and bone hairpins. A few of the items are fragments of wooden tools and furniture. A few Greek ostraka and one clay tablet with a Greek text listing disbursements of doum-fruits were found in the house, but it is impossible to determine with any confidence which, if any, of these objects had to do with the resident family and its social and economic activities (Fig. 84). We can certainly say that the ostraka found in this house deal with the transportation and handling of agricultural commodities on a larger scale than would have been typical of an ordinary household. It has been supposed that the rooms were barrel-vaulted, except for two that were open-air. These two are the ones with the fireplaces,

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and for this reason they have been interpreted by the excavator as inner courtyards, or open or partly open rooms. However, for architectural and climatic reasons this hypothesis is difficult to substantiate. It is possible that one or both of these spaces had lightweight flat roofs. The absence of collapsed walls and ceilings prevents us from assessing fully the presence or absence of niches, the position and the kind of windows, and the presence of any sort of decoration. Despite the poor preservation of B2, it is clear that there was a significant gulf between the lifestyles of the occupants of these two dwellings. Even if, were we to make our way to B2 along the covered alleys of Trimithis from the house of Serenos, we perceived no change in the external environment, once we stepped inside the door of B2 we would be struck by the difference. For instance, although the owner kept his household records in Greek, like Serenos, the walls were apparently unadorned except for whitewash and stripes of color; neither classical mythology in artistic representation nor quotations from classical literature greeted the visitor. The assemblage of animal bones found in B2 contained not only the ubiquitous chicken but also goat, donkey, and cattle bones, along with some wild gazelle—a thoroughly Egyptian assemblage. On the archaeobotanical front, this house has yielded emmer wheat, another traditionally Egyptian foodstuff that was alien to the Greek and Roman diet and almost entirely missing from the papyrological documentation after the early Roman period; and the tablet mentioned above records distributions of doum-fruits, an Egyptian specialty. Probably the inhabitants drank wine, however—beer had lost its dominant place in Egyptian drinking by this time. Although this house was far from unmarked by six hundred years of Greek and Roman rule, it furnishes a strong reminder of just how varied and individual was the integration of the population of a remote city like Trimithis into the culture of the Roman Empire. These two houses of late Trimithis do not follow the classical Mediterranean typology, possessing neither peristyle nor internal courtyards. They seem to have been quite closed, in order to shut out the wind, the sand, and the sun. They were built with the same technique and the same materials, had shallow foundations and no underground cellars. Domestic life certainly took place also on a second story or a terraced roof, accessed by a staircase built around a central pillar. In both cases the staircase is located not in a corner of the house, but in the central

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Figure 83. House B2, storage space under the floor of Room 6.

Figure 84. A clay tablet inscribed with an account of doum fruits, from House B2.

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room. Worth notice is the fact that in both dwellings people would have entered from the street via a few steps descending into a vestibule (or Room 6 in B1), and the doorways were all closed by wooden doors, including the one that opened on to the stairs. There are no bath or toilet facilities. This kind of house—whose main distinguishing feature is a central room giving access to the other rooms—is also common at Kellis.

4 Egyptian Religion at Trimithis during the Roman Period 4.1. The temple

Paola Davoli and Olaf E. Kaper The temple area is located on top of the central hill; it was enclosed by a temenos wall of irregular perimeter (about 66 × 122 m), of which only part of the plan is recoverable and one segment about 5 m high (Fig. 85) survives. It probably had three gates, on the east, north, and west sides. At present the area is flat and harshly eroded; only a conspicuous shapeless mass of mud-brick walls marks its center. The Roman temple proper was built of sandstone blocks, but it has been completely dismantled down to its foundations. Most of the blocks and architraves have been removed and presumably reused in buildings of the Ottoman period in nearby El-Qasr, as several blocks in situ testify (Fig. 86). The area has been ruthlessly dug up, too, mainly in search of sebbakh (natural fertilizer) or clay, and possibly of treasures; consequently, its surface is dotted with circular pits of varying width and depth. These pits were cut in the deep stratigraphy formed during the pharaonic period (§ 2.1, 2.4) and were filled with wind-blown sand and collapsed stone blocks from the temple. The excavation started in 2005, and since then ten squares of 10 × 10 m have been explored. It has been estimated that most of the surviving blocks have now been recovered. Among these, few belonged to the upper courses—like the cavetto cornices—while the majority formed parts of 105

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Figure 85. Plan of the temenos.

the foundations, the paving, and the lower courses of walls and columns. So far only small sections of three collapsed walls have been found, but they were enough to allow us to build up a hypothesis about the temple’s orientation and dimensions. Two of these collapses contained the lower parts of corners, with blocks forming the torus molding so characteristic of Egyptian architecture. From these indications we assume that the temple was oriented toward the east–southeast and extended over an area of about 24 × 14.5 m. The style and masonry of this temple are common in Roman-period Egyptian temples. The Roman temple was built largely with blocks retrieved from earlier ones (see §2.2, 2.3), which had to be adapted to their new functions. Some of these blocks had already been reused in older buildings and so were now adapted for a second time for use in the new walls. The reutilized blocks (spolia) were placed mainly in the core of the walls, sometimes together with the blocks originally abutting them, as is evident in the case of some decorated items (Fig. 87). Because of this massive recycling, the wall masonry, comprising stones of different shapes and sizes, was neither uniform nor solid. For this reason great quantities of gypsum mortar and sandstone chips were used to fill the

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Figure 86. Two reused temple blocks in el-Qasr (photo O. E. Kaper).

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Figure 87. Two stone blocks with baboon decoration, still together despite reuse and demolition (photo O. E. Kaper).

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gaps between the blocks.1 The newly worked blocks are of small and medium size, the outer surfaces having been cut with rough bosses, a well known building technique used in Egypt since the Late Period. Not all the external walls had been smoothed, as some bosses with “pilgrim grooves” (gouges where visitors have scraped out a bit of stone to use for healing or other magical purposes) testify. Dovetail joints are rare, as is evidence of anathyrosis (the hollowing-out of joint beds). So far we cannot say how many columns there were, but some were probably located in front of the temple and included in the screen walls of a porch; others were in the front part (or courtyard), and yet others would have stood in front of the naos (the inner sanctuary). A possible contra-temple (an external shrine accessible to the public) was constructed abutting the rear wall. The layout and style of the temple were probably similar to those at Deir el-Hagar (§1.2), but on a larger scale. The furniture is almost completely missing, except for fragments of two stands for sacred barks and a few fragmentary statues, among which are some baboons, altars, pedestals, and thymiateria, or incense burners. Mud-brick buildings were also constructed in the area; these were probably annexes to the temple, as is commonly found in other temple enclosures; but the presence of fourth-century pottery, ostraka, and a couple of Greek Christian graffiti2 traced on a cavetto cornice and a stone block suggest the presence of people possibly living in this area during the late Roman phase. The decorated relief fragments contain the names of two Roman emperors: Titus and Domitian.3 Of the sanctuary decorated under Titus, only part of the rear wall of one room remains. It seems that the temple was demolished in antiquity, so that only the lower courses of the Roman-period temple remained, together with some collapse from higher up that had fallen to the ground. Very few stones from the higher levels of the building have been found. The reliefs from the sanctuary decorated under Domitian depict a row of goddesses in Egyptian style placed all around the room (Fig. 88). These are the goddesses of the year, and each is shown presenting the hieroglyph for “year”, which is a palm-rib, to the god Thoth. The inscriptions with each of them specify that the year they offer has a certain attribute. The first goddess offers the “good year”, the second “the pure 1. No pottery sherds were used in the masonry of the temple walls, in contrast to their massive use in the mud-brick buildings. 2. Bagnall and Cribiore 2012. 3. Kaper 2012c: 140–2, tables 5.21–23, tables 6.21–22.

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Figure 88. Goddesses in the sanctuary of Domitian.

year”, the third “the peaceful year”, and so on. They can be compared to fairies bringing their gifts to the god of the temple. In the large temples of Edfu and Dendera in the Nile valley, the same goddesses are represented in long rows of thirty-nine, but in Amheida their number was more restricted on account of the limited space on the bottom courses of the sanctuary walls. On the basis of the reconstructed decoration of the rear wall, we can reconstruct the width of the sanctuary as 3.5 m, which is still considerably larger than that of any of the other known temples in the Dakhla Oasis from this time—‘Ain Birbiyeh, Deir el-Hagar, and Ismant el-Kharab (Kellis). Only the temple in Mut may have been larger. In 2014, we found a large stone block with a representation of two Roman-period pharaohs, holding up the sky with their hands (Fig. 89). This decoration identifies the block as a bark pedestal, upon which the processional statue of Thoth would have rested inside the sanctuary. The relief was gilded, and its date can be estimated to be the second century CE, owing to its similarity to the bark stand at Deir el-Hagar, which dates to Hadrian’s reign.

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Figure 89. A pedestal fragment (standing on its right side) showing two Roman emperors as pharaohs holding up the sky.

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4.2. Funerary life: the pyramids Olaf E. Kaper

The cemetery of Amheida extended south of the city, but there were also funerary monuments to the north. The Dakhleh Oasis Project survey team excavated two tomb chapels of the Roman period there, in which were wall paintings with scenes of Egyptian gods, scenes from the Book of the Dead, and from other religious sources.4 The principal structure in the cemetery is a large pyramid, noted earlier, and already described as a pyramid by the earliest modern visitors, Archibald Edmonstone and Bernardino Drovetti, in 1819. Herbert Winlock studied it in 1908, noting: “Around it there are the remains of mud-brick walls, and there are a great many human bones scattered on the slope on which it stands.”5 He also noted another structure at the north end of the site, “a towerlike building, measuring 4 by 6 m. in plan. It is vaulted—the vault springing from pendentives which in turn rest on arches corbeled out in several steps from the walls. Inside these are traces of white stucco.” A recent study by the architect Nicholas Warner, who was in charge of its restoration, has suggested that this may be another funerary monument.6 The main cemetery to the south of Trimithis contains at least two mud-brick pyramids that stood above mausoleum tombs. The larger of these, mentioned in the accounts of those early visitors, survives largely intact and has recently been restored (Figs. 90–91). It measures about 7 m in width and survives up to a height of 8 m. The pyramid is set on a square base 2.2 m high and has a steep angle of some 60 degrees. Interestingly, the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities has in recent years excavated in a cemetery of ancient Mothis (Mut), at Bir el-Shaghala, where another series of elaborately decorated pyramid tombs has come to light.7 Here, the pyramids are slightly different because they have chambers inside. Similar chambers have not been found at Amheida for either of the two preserved pyramids; they must be underneath the pyramids, but these have not yet been excavated. It is clear from the surface remains that there was a complex of chambers immediately around the monument. The excavated pyramid tombs at Bir el-Shaghala show that their chambers 4. Mills 1980: 267–70, pl. 13 5. Winlock 1936: 25. 6. Warner 2012: 4. 7. Bashendi 2013.

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Figure 90. Amheida Pyramid before restoration.

Figure 91. The same pyramid after restoration (photo Christopher Kleihege).

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Figure 92. A reconstructed pyramid at Deir el-Medina (photo O. E. Kaper).

could have been extensively decorated with wall paintings on plaster. Those pyramids were also covered on the outside with a “two-coat render of mud plaster covered with a lime based finishing.”8 As Nicholas Warner has put it, “The [Amheida] pyramid is the best-preserved and largest example of a Roman pyramid in Egypt.” There are in fact few comparable pyramids in Roman Egypt, certainly not of the size constructed at Amheida, but the shape, of course, has a long history. Originally treated as an exclusively royal prerogative, from the mid-18th Dynasty (about 1400 BCE) onwards—when the royals had stopped building pyramids for themselves—small versions of these regal monuments came to adorn private tombs. The last royal ones were steep, at an angle of approximately 60 degrees, and the private pyramids adopted the same, as at Amheida, or a similar angle. It seems that the larger pyramids of earlier times were built at a lesser angle owing to 8. Warner 2012: 4.

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their size. The Bent Pyramid at Dahshur, erected by King Snofru, shows clearly that a steep 54-degree angle was attempted but given up around the halfway point; the top section is built at an angle of 43 degrees, which would become the norm henceforth. The private pyramids being smaller, it became possible to realize the ideal steeper angle in them (Fig. 92). The tips of obelisks seem to reflect the same concept, in that they too were always steep. Some private pyramids of the New Kingdom were built on a small podium, and others on the roof of a funerary chapel. A few were solid, but most seem to have contained a chapel, which is why so many of them have collapsed and disappeared. The Theban necropolis of the New Kingdom must have been dominated by the bright whitewashed pyramids of its many tomb chapels. There is no evidence for pyramid buildings from the Libyan period of Dynasties 21–24, but the kings of the 25th Dynasty, who hailed from the Sudan, took up the pyramid for themselves and their wives. The Sudanese versions were steep, and always set on a low pedestal. After the end of their rule over Egypt, the Sudanese kings and queens continued building pyramids into the fourth century CE. In Egypt, this tomb type was taken up again in the 26th Dynasty in the cemeteries of Thebes and Abydos. All known examples are built of mud brick, set on pedestals of up to one meter high, and contain a domed chamber. The tip of the pyramid was made separately, of stone, and decorated with funerary imagery referring to the sun god or to Osiris. These Late Period pyramids are clearly the model for the one at Amheida. Its size is similar to the pyramid erected in Thebes by an official named Padineith. A puzzle, however, is posed by the length of time between the 26th Dynasty and the Roman period, during which no other pyramid structures are known, and by the fact that the tradition seems to have come to an end elsewhere in Egypt.9 The oases certainly had a distinctive cultural outlook and traditions. There are Roman-period pyramids at other sites, most notably Tomb 7 at Tuna el-Gebel,10 but it is remarkable that this type of tomb has not been preserved elsewhere in the Nile valley or in the Fayyum, except for the small mud-brick pyramids with Coptic monograms at Karanis. The smaller structures at Tuna el-Gebel just cited and the mention of a contemporary pyramid in a third-century-ce papyrus from 9. Pfrommer 2002: 98–103 speculates on the pyramid shape of the Ptolemaic royal tombs in Alexandria. 10. Kessler and Brose 2008; Flossmann and Schütze 2010.

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Oxyrhynchos (P.Lips. 30) offer us limited evidence that the architectural type had not disappeared altogether. Something similar may be observed in the Fezzan region of Libya, where mud-brick pyramid tombs were built by the Garamantes, a desert people, at the sites of Charaig and El Hatir during the Roman period.11 In the papyrus from Oxyrhynchos, a testator gives instructions for the construction of a pyramid, along with other provisions including a foundation to support funerary feasts. Nonetheless, the introduction of large pyramid tombs at two of the major cemeteries of Dakhla is worth remarking on, pointing to a local tradition that existed nowhere else. The unique nature of the oasis may be the reason for this extraordinary independence of mind—it was characterized by an island mentality, and its cultural traditions were deliberately linked to ancient Greece on the one hand (§7.3), and to ancient Egypt on the other.12

4.3. Onomastics Roger S. Bagnall

Apart from the temples, the funerary monuments, and the churches (for the latter, see §5.1), we have another route to studying the religious commitments of the oasis population in the Roman period—their names. To a large extent, the names in papyri and ostraka are directly or indirectly theophoric (“god-bearing”), referring to divinities and often specifically to local cults. These typically assert that an individual is the gift of a particular god or “belongs to” the god. The repertory of such names is often highly localized, just as cults were; when documents from a previously silent part of Egypt become available, we usually reap a harvest of otherwise unknown names. Such theophoric names dominate the documents found in the Great Oasis about as much as they dominate in any other region. Most of the names in question and the divinities from which they derive are Egyptian, relatively few Greek. But the names themselves are sometimes highly Hellenized in form (Ammonios, Sarapion, for instance), most often linguistically Egyptian but given Greek endings (Petosiris, Psenamounis), and less commonly just transcriptions of Egyptian into Greek letters (for example, Pamoun). Because the oasis texts come mainly from the period between the mid-third century and the beginning of the fifth century of our era, the 11. Daniels 1989. 12. Kaper 2012b.

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Oxyrhynchos (P.Lips. 30) offer us limited evidence that the architectural type had not disappeared altogether. Something similar may be observed in the Fezzan region of Libya, where mud-brick pyramid tombs were built by the Garamantes, a desert people, at the sites of Charaig and El Hatir during the Roman period.11 In the papyrus from Oxyrhynchos, a testator gives instructions for the construction of a pyramid, along with other provisions including a foundation to support funerary feasts. Nonetheless, the introduction of large pyramid tombs at two of the major cemeteries of Dakhla is worth remarking on, pointing to a local tradition that existed nowhere else. The unique nature of the oasis may be the reason for this extraordinary independence of mind—it was characterized by an island mentality, and its cultural traditions were deliberately linked to ancient Greece on the one hand (§7.3), and to ancient Egypt on the other.12

4.3. Onomastics Roger S. Bagnall

Apart from the temples, the funerary monuments, and the churches (for the latter, see §5.1), we have another route to studying the religious commitments of the oasis population in the Roman period—their names. To a large extent, the names in papyri and ostraka are directly or indirectly theophoric (“god-bearing”), referring to divinities and often specifically to local cults. These typically assert that an individual is the gift of a particular god or “belongs to” the god. The repertory of such names is often highly localized, just as cults were; when documents from a previously silent part of Egypt become available, we usually reap a harvest of otherwise unknown names. Such theophoric names dominate the documents found in the Great Oasis about as much as they dominate in any other region. Most of the names in question and the divinities from which they derive are Egyptian, relatively few Greek. But the names themselves are sometimes highly Hellenized in form (Ammonios, Sarapion, for instance), most often linguistically Egyptian but given Greek endings (Petosiris, Psenamounis), and less commonly just transcriptions of Egyptian into Greek letters (for example, Pamoun). Because the oasis texts come mainly from the period between the mid-third century and the beginning of the fifth century of our era, the 11. Daniels 1989. 12. Kaper 2012b.

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picture for personal names is somewhat different from what we might have found in the first two centuries of Roman rule, or even earlier, when the giving of theophoric names was at its peak; and the oasis picture will continue to develop as the Ptolemaic ostraka from Mut are studied by Günter Vittmann. The documents from Trimithis belong to the era of transition, between the flourishing of the indigenous Egyptian cults and the dominance of Christianity in Egypt. In the case of Trimithis, we have found a major divide between the texts assignable to the time of Diocletian (284–305) and the immediately following years, and those connected with the period of the occupation of Serenos’ house (about 340–370). The first group is almost entirely traditional Egyptian, the second not. In the first group, we find a few gods dominating the names in the well tags (see § 5.2) and in texts contemporary with them. Names formed from Amun are common, in both its Egyptian form (Psenamounis, “son of Amun,” is by far the commonest) and its Hellenized form Ammonios. Amon-Nakht, the god of ‘Ain Birbiyeh, may be represented by the name Pinachthes. Horus, mostly simply in the form of the god’s name, is also very widely found. The third very popular theophoric name is Psais, “the Shai,” referring to the snake-form divinity of good fortune. The patron divinity of Kellis, Tutu, is also well represented in the form Tithoes. These two demontaming popular gods of the oasis were still a major source of names down to the first quarter of the fourth century. Petosiris, “the gift of Osiris,” is also still widely used at Trimithis. Many traditional names, however, had started to go out of use at this time, and the range of divinities after whom parents named their children narrowed significantly. But alongside the regiments of people named Horos, Tithoes, Psais, Ammon, and Psenamounis, we still find in the early fourth century a certain number of names drawn from cults not at that point as influential in naming as they might have been earlier. They are still present, but now distinctly rare. The junior member of the Theban triad, Chonsu, is invisible at Kellis, and found at Trimithis only occasionally in Petechon (“the gift of Chonsu”). Bes and Sarapis make an appearance at Kellis, but Bes is invisible at Trimithis, while Sarapis is not uncommon. Oddly, Tapsais, Tutu’s consort, is rare at Kellis, and Neith, his mother, is absent; neither figures at Trimithis, either. Seth, the chief god of Mut, appears still fairly commonly in the name Pisechthis, but apparently hardly ever in any other form.

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Thoth, the main god of Trimithis, is fairly well represented in the fourth-century texts, mainly in the form Pathotes (“the one belonging to Thoth”). At the same time, a certain number of names based on his Greek counterpart, Hermes, are attested. The Trimithitan onomastic repertory also includes derivatives of divinities such as Isis, Nephotes, Rait, Atum, Apis, Renenutet, Anoubis, the Nile, and a few others. In Serenos’ circle, by contrast with the almost entirely Egyptian theophoric repertory of the well tags and the tenants represented on them, we find many Greek and Roman names: apart from Serenos himself, these include Gelasios, Gerontios, Domnion, Zoilos, Herakleios, Theodoros, Iulianus, Claudius, Nikokles, Ninos, Sarapion, Faustianus, and Philippos. There are signs here of the imprint of Greek classical literature, discussed in §7.3. And the Roman influence too is noteworthy. It is not yet an especially Christianized set of names, but outside the inner circle of Serenos and his agents, individuals connected with his household or its period of occupation include Makarios, Martyrios, Paulos, Dorotheos, Theodoros, Ioannes, Matthaios, Timotheos, Papnouthes, and Psenpnouthes. These are all Christian names, and the Hebrew names from the Old Testament found there too, like Jacob, Ephrem, Jonah, Elias (Elijah), and Joseph, also no doubt belong to Christians.13 Some of these names are borne by multiple individuals. By 350–370, then, a fair number of Christian names were in use; and as these are the names of adults, they were no doubt for the most part given at least twenty or thirty years earlier. In the late third and the first quarter of the fourth century, even though the names of Trimithitans were not yet to any great degree Christianized in the way that starts to be visible in mid-century, neither do they reflect much continuing investment in most of the large range of cults known in the oasis in previous centuries. The repertory, narrow to the point of monotony, may point to inertia, the tendency to pass names on from generation to generation in the absence of any reason to do otherwise, rather than to current thanksgiving to the gods for safe childbirth.

13. On the reasons for seeing these names as Christian rather than Jewish, see most recently Choat 2006: 51–6, with bibliography.

5 Christianity at Trimithis and in the Dakhla Oasis 5.1. The church of Trimithis Nicola Aravecchia

The excavations at Kellis, where three churches have been discovered so far (see §5.3), have shown that Christianity was well established in the Dakhla Oasis in the first part of the fourth century. In light of Trimithis’ size and particularly of its administrative, economic, and also cultural role there, the city seems likely in its last decades to have seen its urban landscape dotted with churches and other places of Christian cult and congregation, as is suggested by the existence of numerous churches at other sites in Dakhla and—even more profusely—in the neighboring Kharga Oasis. Any hesitancy in this assessment is largely owed to the fact that up to very recent years, no archaeological evidence of churches or any other type of Christian monuments had been detected at Amheida. During the 2009 conference of the Dakhleh Oasis Project in Lecce, Roger Bagnall and Raffaella Cribiore presented the limited thenavailable documentary evidence concerning the existence of a Christian community at Amheida.1 This material, which is discussed in more detail in the following section (§5.2), comes primarily from the temple area and strongly suggests Christianity’s presence at Trimithis during the fourth century. 1. Bagnall and Cribiore 2012.

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Figure 93. Amheida: The church (B7) before excavation (view to the south).

Figure 94. Plan of church B7 at Amheida.

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In 2012, however, archaeological investigation was begun in Area 2.3, situated to the east of the public bath, B6, and roughly halfway between the north and south edges of the city. The precise location is the top of a mound that grants an unobstructed view (likely also in antiquity) over large portions of the city. The primary goal was to excavate a large building (designated B7) that had been mapped a few years earlier during the topographical survey. At that time, several features were noticed that, based on comparative evidence from other sites in Dakhla and Kharga, suggested a possible identification of this space as a church. In fact, most architectural features of B7 were already visible—although heavily eroded—at present-day ground level before we started excavating (Fig. 93). Only one cluster of partially collapsed walls was standing at some height above the ground, to the south of a large rectangular space labeled Room 1. Throughout the site we can observe the existence of buildings or rooms that stand at a considerable height, in apparent defiance of the destructive forces that have leveled most of the site. This phenomenon still awaits convincing explanation. Room 1 is a large rectangular space (about 12 × 13.65 m), oriented toward the east (Fig. 94). It was part of a larger complex, which included a set of smaller spaces built along the south wall of Room 1, plus three roughly square rooms along the east wall. Further to the east, where the ground slopes down quite sharply nowadays, the topographical survey revealed extensive traces of a large rectangular space whose precise layout, function, and relationship to the rest of the complex are also yet to be determined. The three spaces along the east wall of Room 1 have almost completely disappeared, due to human intervention or (more likely) wind erosion. What is currently visible at ground level is the upper part— including sectors of mud-brick vaults, still in situ—of substructures once supporting those rooms, which were roughly at the same level as Room 1 and once opened onto it.2 The main entrance to Room 1 was most probably somewhere along the west wall. Against this wall—and inside the room—are two square bases that define a space situated exactly along the room’s main east– west axis. Topographical work revealed evidence of what might be a narrow passageway precisely in line with the west doorway and that main axis (Fig. 95). If the topographical relationship of this passageway with Room 1 is corroborated by future excavations, it may provide the 2. At least two such substructures.

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physical link (or one of the links) connecting B7 with the urban fabric of Amheida to the west and therefore support the identification of the west doorway as the main access to the building. The two square bases have very deep foundations, suggesting that they might have supported heavy architectural elements, such as engaged semi-columns or pillars to frame a relatively monumental doorway. Two other doorways were found in the southeast corner of Room 1. One of them opened onto the southernmost of the three small spaces to the east, while the other led to a staircase ascending southward and, via the landing of the staircase, to a set of seven spaces to the south of Room 1. Some of these spaces, whose nature and functional relationship to the church are generally difficult to determine due to their poor condition and the lack of evidence, show clear signs of having been reused after they were abandoned. Among these signs are two clay and mud-brick stoves that were built in two of the rooms after the ceilings had collapsed— as evidence that we found at floor level indicates, and as we assumed from the fact that stoves were generally built in open spaces to allow the smoke to escape. Room 1 was divided into a central nave and side-aisles by two rows of mud-brick columns. The colonnades ran east–west, and their foundation walls were bonded at their east and west ends with north–south-oriented foundation walls, forming a rectangle. The two colonnades were seemingly joined at their west end with a return aisle,3 which created a sort of ambulatory along the inner perimeter of the room (Fig. 96). Our excavation revealed only the foundation walls of the colonnades and the square bases and lowest courses of a few columns, including two pillars of heart-shaped cross-section at the east end of the north and south colonnades. The foundations of an indistinct, roughly rectangular mud-brick feature are visible at the east end of the north colonnade. The location of this architectural element suggests that it may have been a pulpit. Indeed, this feature seems to find robust comparison at the fourth-century church of Shams ed-Din in Kharga, where a pulpit was built at exactly the same spot and in a shape that is not dissimilar.4 A mud-brick bench, or mastaba, for the audience was found running for more than 5 m along the inner face of the church’s south wall. It is likely that a mastaba like this ran also along the north wall of the room, although no traces are visible nowadays because of the poor preservation 3. A typical feature of churches particularly in Upper Egypt. 4. See Bonnet 2004: 84 (fig. 69) for a plan of the church.

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Figure 95. A passageway leading to church B7 (view to the east).

Figure 96. Room 1 of the church showing a line of colonnades (view to the southeast).

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Figure 97. The stepped platform in Room 1 of the church (view to the southeast).

of that wall. The building had a floor of compacted clay, laid out in different phases, this too now poorly preserved. Even where the floor is more clearly discernible, we noted a significant difference between the elevation of the latest floor level in the north and south aisles and that of the nave of the church, which is about 10 cm higher. A well preserved rectangular platform abuts the inner face of Room 1’s east wall. It was constructed centrally, in line with the west entrance and along the room’s main axis (Fig. 97). Access to the platform was not frontal but via two flights of steps, one on each of its north and south sides. To the north and south ends of the platform are two rectangular mud-brick bases; these still bear evidence, though scanty, of the lowest course of engaged semi-columns, which framed a large opening (almost 2 m wide) onto a raised space to the east of Room 1. In fact, this platform provides conclusive evidence that this room was once architecturally linked with the central space to its east, now almost completely lost. This was presumably where the apse was, flanked by two side-chambers. The immediate fate of B7 after its abandonment is unknown. Once again, the entire structure shows, in its current state, noticeable signs of severe erosion, particularly along its west side. Architectural features are visible above the original floor level only in the eastern half, to a

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Figure 98. A test trench dug along the north aisle of the church (view to the east).

maximum height of about 0.75 m in the southeast corner. As mentioned earlier, on this mound only Room 7, to the south of Room 1, withstood erosion and human destruction, while most nearby walls were either destroyed or eroded to foundation level. The church had impressively deep foundations, reaching 3 m below the ancient floor level in the northwest corner of Room 1 (Fig. 98). B7

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was built, at least in part, by first cutting through a leveling layer of broken mud bricks. Although it is yet to be determined whether this leveling layer lay on top of bedrock or other deposits—perhaps even the remains of earlier buildings—the church’s foundations testify to the considerable effort that was put into the construction of a sizable, even monumental, edifice. Our investigation of the relatively limited stratigraphy inside Room 1 revealed some evidence for the collapse of walls, which seem to have once been covered, at least in large part, with white plaster. What is particularly worth mentioning in this context is a Greek inscription painted on a fragment of wall plaster that was found to the north of the stepped platform, although not in situ. Apart from several hard-toread letters, the words ho theos (Greek for “God”) were easily identified, thereby offering further evidence to support the assertion that the building was a church. Even though the walls seem to have been largely undecorated, at least in Room 1, the ceiling was another matter. We found ample evidence of a collapsed flat ceiling, including thousands of fragments of painted plaster. Many of these are still attached to a thick layer of mud that bears the imprints of palm ribs, pointing unmistakably to their original location as part of the ceiling. The larger pieces, as well as innumerable fragments, were collected and studied by Dorothea Schulz, with the goal of reconstructing the decorative program that once adorned the church’s ceiling (Fig. 99). Both the larger patches and the fragments display a wide array of shapes, colors, and motifs. Among them is a purple band ornate with lines in different shades of yellow and a simple vegetal motif, which may have framed the decorated ceiling. The main design seems to consist of geometrical patterns including squares, triangles, and lozenges forming stars, as well as other interlocking shapes such as pentagons, hexagons, and octagons. The choice of these geometric forms and their elaborate combination tell us that the original plan was undoubtedly to create the effect of a coffer design, so intricate as to be very difficult to fully reconstruct. The aesthetic appreciation of the ceiling’s decoration must have been considerably enhanced by the use of brightly colored shapes outlined by thick black lines and in dramatic contrast to the less ornate (if not—as mentioned above—entirely white) walls that once supported the roof. Comparative evidence for this type of ceiling decoration can be found in Dakhla, but in the context of domestic architecture. A Roman

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Figure 99. Church (B7), large fragments of painted plaster from the ceiling.

house dated to the second century CE, excavated by Colin Hope at Kellis, revealed an elaborate decorative project, including remains of a collapsed ceiling ornamentation of interlocking geometric shapes.5 These included rectangles, octagons, and lozenges forming eight-pointed stars (like those at Amheida), which, according to Helen Whitehouse, who studied the house’s decoration, were meant to reproduce the perspective effects of a coffered ceiling.6 This seems to be the case at Amheida too. However, it is worth adding that the decorative program in the Kellis house included not only geometric shapes but also busts of divinities in octagonal frames, whereas no figural ornamentation was added to the church ceiling at Amheida.7 In the neighboring oasis of Kharga there is evidence for the adoption of a very similar design, within a Christian funerary context and of a time closer to the church of Amheida. Inside one of the larger family tombs at the necropolis of Bagawat is a chapel (number 25) that has a vaulted apse ceiling, decorated at least in part with the same range of interlocking squares, lozenges, and octagons, although the choice 5. Hope and Whitehouse 2006. 6. Hope and Whitehouse 2006: 321. 7. At least, based on the available evidence.

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of colors is different.8 This example along with the fragments from the ceiling of the Amheida church suggest that in Egypt a decorative style using geometric shapes to create the visual effects of coffering enjoyed a long life. It was certainly well known in the Roman period and continued throughout Late Antiquity, when it was adopted also within the context of Christian public and semi-public architecture. The funerary nature of the chapel at Bagawat is even more striking when one considers the eight human burials found in 2012 and 2013 inside B7. One skeleton was found in situ near the northwest corner of the church, although most of the burial pit had disappeared due to either human disturbance or erosion. All the other pits were intact. No funerary goods were found associated with the excavated tombs. The orientation of all the bodies was with the heads placed to the west (so that on rising the person would face east), which is quite standard for Christian burials, and compares with evidence from other Christian cemeteries in the oasis; we find it, for example, at Kellis, Deir Abu Matta, and at a site northeast of Muzawwaqa.9 The physical anthropologists Tosha Dupras and Lana Williams analyzed some of the bodies and supplied a significant amount of data on the gender, age range, pathologies, and possible causes of death of the individuals who were buried in these tombs. Quite thought-provoking is the fact that people of both sexes and of all ages, including at least one adolescent, were buried inside the church, even in prominent spots near the sanctuary; this should lead us to think about how sacred space was used in funerary churches and—more specifically—about who its beneficiaries were, after death, within the ancient local community. Three of the eight burials were found not inside or alongside the church’s main body, but in what turned out to be one of the most exciting discoveries about this building. Excavations under the now-disappeared north side-room (presumably a pastophorion or sacristy) led to the discovery of an underground funerary crypt (Room 2 in the plan) (Fig. 100). It is a very well preserved space, with a mud floor and only the uppermost part of the vault no longer in place. Inside it are three sealed tombs with mud-brick superstructures. Through a doorway in the south wall, the crypt opened onto a so far unexcavated space below the apse that may have been part of the same crypt. 8. Illustrated in Fakhry 1951: 83 (pl. VI: reconstruction); Zibawi 2003: 24, fig. 14; Zibawi 2005: 24–25 (pl. V.1–2); 30–31 (figs. 7, 9).. 9. Bowen 2003b; 2008; 2009; 2012.

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Figure 100. The funerary crypt under the north pastophorion of the church (view to the southeast).

It is beyond doubt, based on the rich body of available evidence, that B7 at Amheida was purposely built as a church for the local Christian community in the early fourth century. The church had features—a basilica with a central nave, side-aisles and west return aisle, a sanctuary accessible via a raised platform and flanked by service rooms—that were relatively standard in the Christian architecture of late antique Egypt. Other churches in the region of the Great Oasis, generally datable to the same period, present significant similarities to Amheida’s. In particular, the Large East Church at Kellis shows a very similar layout—a central nave, two side-aisles, a west return aisle, and a set of rooms opening to the south of the building.10 Furthermore, the apse area was once accessed from the nave via a rectangular platform with steps built along its north and south sides, reflecting the arrangement adopted at Amheida. Another building that offers a significant number of similarities is the church of Shams ed-Din (Kharga), mentioned on p. 122. Here too, the layout reflects the basic architectural design of the church at Amheida, including a long rectangular platform placed in front of the apse, although at Shams ed-Din it was accessed frontally and not from the 10. Bowen 2002: 65–75.

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north and south sides, as at both Amheida and Kellis. The large space to the east of Amheida’s church is also quite suggestive—although it is yet to be investigated—of a courtyard adjoining the Shams ed-Din church, which was identified by its French excavators as a kathesterion (or sitting space for visitors, equipped with benches around the walls).11 Clearly, Amheida’s church fits with the architectural standards that were so widely adopted in the region of the Western Desert and throughout Upper Egypt in the fourth century. As regards the nature of the liturgical practices once carried out inside the church, the evidence is scanty at best. However, what is undeniable is that the presence of burials in the church and in the crypt suggests that B7 served, at least at some point (and probably from the very beginning, as the existence of the crypt itself would suggest), as a funerary church. Certainly, it remained in use after the deposition of the burials near the sanctuary, since the mud-brick coverings of the pits were sealed by a floor that extended throughout the east half of the nave and side-aisles. The association of a church with funerary practices is well attested at this time in Dakhla, for example at Deir Abu Matta, where Gillian Bowen discovered not long ago several burials inside the church.12 The West Church of Kellis may also have been associated with funerary practices, as the graves inside it, near the apse, and immediately to the east of the building, suggest.13 The presence of the church in Amheida shows that the Christian community had the means to choose a prime location for the construction of such a building. We may suppose that B7 was one of several churches, considering the size and importance of the city, and another probable church stands at the northwest side of the cemetery. Indeed, B7 must have enjoyed a high degree of visibility as one of the city’s most striking landmarks. This was the case elsewhere in Dakhla, for example at the rural settlement of ‘Ain el-Gedida (§5.3). Here, a church was strategically situated at the center of the main mound, overshadowing the remains of an older Egyptian temple. Although Amheida and ‘Ain el-Gedida are hardly comparable sites, with regard to size, monumentality, and administrative or economic significance, they effectively show how Christianity had become, by the early fourth century, a key element of the religious landscape even in this remote oasis of the ancient world. 11. Wagner 1987: 182. 12. Bowen 2009: 10,13. 13. Bowen 2002: 75–81.

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5.2. Other evidence of Christianity at Amheida14 Roger S. Bagnall and Raffaella Cribiore

Even before we had reliably identified a church at Trimithis, there was adequate evidence for the presence of Christianity in the city, not least the titles of members of the clergy and a number of Christian personal names. Priests, presbyteroi, occur in two ostraka, and deacons in five. Christian names, as noted earlier, include Martyrios, Makarios, Paulos, Timotheos, Psenpnouthes, and also no doubt Moses, Ephrem, Jonah, and Joseph. Few of these are commonly found, however, and the direct evidence for Christianity from the ostraka would best be described as modest. One striking find from the temple hill is an ostrakon discovered in 2008 (O.Trim. 2.819) bearing a list of names including Jacob and Abraham, and headed by ho pater, “the father” (or “our father”). The other names, however, are not distinctively Christian, and fading or breakage has removed any numbers that may have been written on the right side of this ostrakon, if it was in fact, as we suppose, an account. A graffito of one Horigenes, son of Ioannes, on a stone is also probably Christian. Even though Horigenes is a theophoric name derived from Horos, it was also the name of the famous early-thirdcentury Alexandrian theologian and scholar Origen. More importantly for our purposes, Ioannes is distinctively Christian. But most arresting of all is a stone block (inv. 3053) in the middle of which someone has written a Greek verse. This comes either from an altar (as Paola Davoli has suggested) or from the base of a statue (as Olaf Kaper thinks). The ink is quite faded in parts and demands persistent and prolonged autopsy—in natural-color photographs the text is almost illegible (Fig. 101). It reads: ἀνθρώπων βιότοιο κυβερνήτης μέγας Ἄμμων [Great Ammon is the pilot of the life of men.]

This is a perfect hexameter line with an epic ring that calls to mind various literary reminiscences. It is in a way a kind of pastiche, reflecting the religious and cultural syncretism of Egypt. 14. Much of the material in this section appears in an earlier version in Bagnall and Cribiore 2012.

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Figure 101. A graffito with an invocation of Ammon (infrared photo).

The concept of steering oneself through life occurs once in a letter of the Ptolemaic period. The metaphorical use of the verb “to pilot” and its noun becomes more frequent in literary attestations of the Roman period. In the second century, it is worth noting, Dio Chrysostom (in Or. 63.7.8) writes that “Tyche [the goddess of chance] governs a man’s life,” using the verb in a sense very similar to our line on the stone. What makes Dio’s words notable is the fact that he is referring to a deity as the pilot of mortal life. In fact, man is usually presented as his own pilot, while life and its troubles are regarded as the waves of a tempest. Thus the Cappadocian Fathers, who frequently employ the phrase, encourage man to overcome the waves of misfortune they encounter, becoming their own pilots of their life; for example, Gregory of Nyssa, in his On Virginity, says that the good man, “like a good pilot with his boat, looks only up to heaven in guiding his life.” Like Dio, however, John Chrysostom, in his On Genesis (In Genesim 53.118.16), regards God as the pilot: “We navigate through the sea of our present life, led by the great pilot, God.” Ammon, the Greek form of the name of the Egyptian god Amun, was the dominant traditional god of the oases. The hellenized Ammon had his main sanctuary in the Siwa Oasis, which Alexander the Great

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famously visited in early 331; from this visit originated the claim that Alexander was Ammon’s son. Ammon appears as the great god in the Historia Alexandri Magni (the “Alexander Romance”). Although the concept that the gods, and one god in particular, give life to men is uncommon in Greek literature, it is a commonplace in Egypt from as early as the Old Kingdom. Amun was regularly seen as the source of life, but more interesting are the remarkably direct invocations of Amun as the pilot of life found in New Kingdom prayers discussed by Jan Assmann.15 One describes him as “Pilot who knows the water, rudder that does not lead astray.” “You are Amun who comes to him, who calls unto him, the pilot who knows the water, the rudder that does not lead astray,” goes another. “If a man’s tongue is the boat’s rudder, the Lord of All is its pilot,” says yet a third. If our graffito of Horigenes is Greek in expression, the sentiment, by contrast, is deeply rooted in Egyptian religion. Although Amun was not the god to whom the temple of Amheida was dedicated, he was, as already noted, the principal god of the western oases. Olaf Kaper tells us that there is an image of Amun-Re of Hibis (Amenebis) on the gateway of ‘Ain Birbiyeh, decorated under Augustus, which attributes to the god the following titles: “Amun-Re Lord of Hibis, the Great God, strong of might, King of the Gods, who gives [this verb is uncertain] the breath of life, who lets the constricted throat breathe, who causes all that exists to live.” A good pagan hexameter line, then, Greek in expression but deeply rooted in Egyptian thought, written on a stone block in the temple of Thoth. Now, above this line are some rather faint traces of writing in a much smaller hand. We believe that at the top right it is possible to make out ete pnoute, which we take to be a Coptic gloss on the whole inscription, putting forward the view that it is God, pnoute, who is the governor of life, not Ammon. A bit of not entirely friendly religious dialogue in late antiquity, it would appear. These graffiti certainly indicate that by Amheida’s last period of occupation, which on present evidence seems to be the last quarter of the fourth century, the temple was no longer in use as such, but was accessible to Christians who wished to leave a mark of their own religion on the structure and its contents. This is hardly surprising, but we have no means of telling at what date it became possible to do so. The excavations in the temple area also uncovered a considerable number of 15. Assmann 1995: 194.

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Figure 102. An ostrakon bearing an account headed “the father” (or “our father”) (O.Trim. 2.819).

tags from jars of the same type found in the large fourth-century house designated B1. At least one of these is from the fourth century, namely O.Trim. 1.127, dated to a year 33, which is to be assigned to the reign of the emperor Constantius II and thus corresponds to the year 356/7. There are two other indications that activity on the hill was continuing at this time: the mentions of Psais the deacon, known from two other ostraka (O.Trim. 1.383), and of Nikokles and Philippos (O.Trim. 286). Both men are well known from the final occupation phase of House B1, during the 350s and 360s. We cannot, however, be certain from these ostraka whether the activity in question consisted simply of dumping trash on a partly abandoned hill, or whether it had something to do with habitation on the hill itself. Nor do the graffiti tell us the answer to this question, as their presence is consistent with either hypothesis.

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We might draw a slight hint from the list or account mentioned earlier, headed by “the father” (or “our father”) (Fig. 102). A similar text was found in 2008 during Gillian Bowen’s excavations of a church and perhaps a monastic site at Deir Abu Matta (situated between Mut and Amheida). The meaning of “father” in neither case is entirely clear, but we know of no similar texts of this period in which it refers to any secular office in local or Imperial government. If the reference is to leadership in some kind of religious community, this would certainly be consistent with the Deir Abu Matta excavators’ hypothesis that that church was attached to a community of some kind, the adjacent building perhaps being a monastic keep.16 Nothing has been found at Amheida so far to indicate with certainty the presence there of any monastic establishment. But given the presentday condition of the top of the temple hill, it is impossible to exclude any hypothesis—and this includes the notion that in the fourth century, interspersed with the contemporary brick buildings there may have been places for dumping debris from nearby parts of the city that were still fully active.

5.3. Other Churches in Dakhla: Kellis, ‘Ain el-Gedida, Deir Abu Matta, Deir el-Molouk, ‘Ain es-Sabil Nicola Aravecchia

More than a century ago Herbert Winlock, an Egyptologist affiliated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, set off for the Dakhla Oasis on an adventurous trip.17 In his travel diary, published in 1936, he remarked on the astounding scarcity of Christian antiquities throughout the oasis, especially in comparison with the wealth of evidence from the nearby Kharga Oasis. For this state of affairs he blamed the relatively long distance of Dakhla from the Nile valley and its Roman garrisons, which exposed the oasis to the dangers of invasion and destruction by neighboring nomadic tribes—likely to have been the cause of most towns and villages of the region being abandoned during the late Roman period.18 Winlock’s remarks about the absence of substantial visible remains of Christian cemeteries and monuments—with the notable exception 16. Bowen 2012. 17. Winlock 1936. 18. Winlock 1936: 60–1.

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We might draw a slight hint from the list or account mentioned earlier, headed by “the father” (or “our father”) (Fig. 102). A similar text was found in 2008 during Gillian Bowen’s excavations of a church and perhaps a monastic site at Deir Abu Matta (situated between Mut and Amheida). The meaning of “father” in neither case is entirely clear, but we know of no similar texts of this period in which it refers to any secular office in local or Imperial government. If the reference is to leadership in some kind of religious community, this would certainly be consistent with the Deir Abu Matta excavators’ hypothesis that that church was attached to a community of some kind, the adjacent building perhaps being a monastic keep.16 Nothing has been found at Amheida so far to indicate with certainty the presence there of any monastic establishment. But given the presentday condition of the top of the temple hill, it is impossible to exclude any hypothesis—and this includes the notion that in the fourth century, interspersed with the contemporary brick buildings there may have been places for dumping debris from nearby parts of the city that were still fully active.

5.3. Other Churches in Dakhla: Kellis, ‘Ain el-Gedida, Deir Abu Matta, Deir el-Molouk, ‘Ain es-Sabil Nicola Aravecchia

More than a century ago Herbert Winlock, an Egyptologist affiliated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, set off for the Dakhla Oasis on an adventurous trip.17 In his travel diary, published in 1936, he remarked on the astounding scarcity of Christian antiquities throughout the oasis, especially in comparison with the wealth of evidence from the nearby Kharga Oasis. For this state of affairs he blamed the relatively long distance of Dakhla from the Nile valley and its Roman garrisons, which exposed the oasis to the dangers of invasion and destruction by neighboring nomadic tribes—likely to have been the cause of most towns and villages of the region being abandoned during the late Roman period.18 Winlock’s remarks about the absence of substantial visible remains of Christian cemeteries and monuments—with the notable exception 16. Bowen 2012. 17. Winlock 1936. 18. Winlock 1936: 60–1.

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of the church of Deir Abu Matta—were undoubtedly justified at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, the picture has radically changed in the past few decades, thanks to intensive archaeological investigation carried out at several sites in Dakhla. We have already given some hint of the wealth of material for fourth-century Christianity in the oasis, and although it remains true that Kharga has more abundant Christian monuments and is relatively better known, there can be no doubt that Dakhla too proved to be a good location for thriving early Christian communities. The DOP survey recorded well over one hundred archaeological sites supplying evidence for human occupation in the oasis from about 300 to 700 CE.19 As Egypt was already in the mid-fourth century a profoundly Christianized country, it is likely that Christian communities were somehow linked to most or all of the “Byzantine” sites identified in Dakhla, but the mere fact that people from different ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds coexisted in Egypt in Late Antiquity prevents any easy generalization. It is, in particular, thanks to the work of Colin Hope and Gillian Bowen at Kellis that a large amount of evidence on early Christian architecture in Dakhla was first made available to the scholarly and general audience and became a point of reference for anyone interested in the origins of Egyptian Christianity. Kellis (modern Ismant el-Kharab) is about 2.5 km southeast of the village of Ismant and roughly 11 km east of Mut, the capital of the oasis. In 1981, a DOP team surveyed the site, and large-scale excavations began in 1986. The DOP survey revealed substantial evidence of three churches at Kellis.20 One is located along the west edge of the village, and two are part of an extensive, multi-roomed complex at the south end of the settlement.21 The West Church, excavated in 1992–93, measures 15 by 7 m and is oriented to the east (Fig. 103). It consists of two rooms, one to the west, possibly functioning as a narthex, and one to the east, with a passageway placed centrally within the shared wall. Along the east wall is an apse with a raised floor, accessed up a step. The conch (semicircular apse) is flanked by engaged semi-columns and in front of it is a raised platform, reached from the west up another couple of steps. Two doorways, placed to the north and south of the apse, open onto small side-rooms. Low benches run along the walls of 19. Churcher and Mills 1999: 263–4. 20. Knudstad and Frey 1999: 189, 201, 205. 21. Bowen 2002; 2003a.

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Figure 103. Plan of the West Church complex at Kellis (after Bowen 2002, 76, fig. 8).

the two rooms forming the main body of the church, the only access to which is through a doorway in the south wall of the narthex. This opens onto a cluster of seven rooms, together with the church forming an architectural complex. The area covered by these spaces, the function of which is unclear, roughly equals that of the church. The only entrance to the complex is in the southwest corner; it opens onto a large rectangular room with benches, possibly functioning as an anteroom. Two Christian burials were found near the sanctuary, and others in its proximity outside the church. These discoveries led the excavators to identify the complex as funerary.22 The location of the two burials inside the West Church is very similar to that of some 22. Bowen 2002: 78–81.

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Figure 104. Kellis, plan of the East Churches complex (after Bowen 2002, 66, fig. 2).

of the burials found inside the church of Trimithis. According to the numismatic evidence, the foundation of the West Church complex dates to around the mid-fourth century CE.23 The ostraka found in the buildings largely date to the third quarter of that century, and have links that can be established with similar material from the nearby site of ‘Ain es-Sabil, mentioned below. The two churches built on the southeast periphery of Kellis were, as has already been noted, once part of a rather large complex (Fig. 104). The so-called Small East Church stands near the southeast corner of its enclosure, built against the east wall. The church’s overall dimensions are 10.5 × 9.5 m, and it is formed of two interconnected rectangular rooms oriented east–west. To the north is a large hall, originally barrel-vaulted, that was once accessible through a doorway in the middle of the north wall—bricked in at some point in antiquity—and through another door in the south half of the west wall. Only from this room could one enter the church to the south, via two doors—the larger one located in the 23. Bowen 2002: 83.

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middle of the wall separating the two rooms and the narrower one at the west end of the same wall. Gillian Bowen found ample evidence that the room had not been built originally as a church, and that its conversion into an ecclesiastical building had entailed several alterations.24 The most significant of these was the addition of a raised, tripartite sanctuary set against the east wall, with a central apse—delimited by two pilasters and richly decorated—and two side-rooms. According to ceramic and numismatic evidence, the Small East Church, which shares several significant similarities with the church of ‘Ain el-Gedida, as we shall see, was in use during the first half of the fourth century.25 Bowen argues that the Small East Church should be regarded as a domus ecclesiae, a domestic building converted by a Christian congregation in need of a place in which to gather and celebrate the Eucharist.26 In that case it would slightly predate the construction of the Large East Church, which was, by contrast, the result of careful planning and possibly served a rapidly growing Christian population. The Large East Church is a rectangular structure built against the complex’s southeast enclosure wall (Fig. 104). Measuring 20 × 17 m and oriented eastward, it is in a fairly good state of preservation, and some of its walls stand to a considerable height. Access was originally via three doorways set in the western wall and connecting the church with the larger ecclesiastical complex. The main body of the church is divided by two rows of six columns into a central nave and two side-aisles. The bases of the two columns at the west end of both colonnades show that they originally had a trefoil shape. A west return aisle was created by adding an extra column between the north and south colonnades, against which is a stepped mud-brick platform. To the east, a transverse aisle with four columns completes the ambulatory, which runs along the four walls of the church and surrounds a central area paved with flagstones. There are benches against the north, west, and south walls. The north and south spaces between the columns were originally sealed with wooden screens, as was the northwest intercolumniation of the return aisle. The sanctuary consists of a raised apse centrally placed against the east wall, framed by two engaged pilasters and with a floor of triangular mud bricks. A rectangular bema (a platform used by clergy), accessed by two steps at 24. Bowen 2003a: 158–62. 25. Bowen 2003a: 164. 26. Bowen 2003a: 162–4.

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its north and south ends, is situated in front of the apse and protrudes into the transverse aisle. The apse is flanked by two small service rooms, entered from the transverse aisle; the south room is also directly connected with the apse via two steps. Through the south aisle can be reached a set of four rooms to the south of the church. The function of three of these is unknown, but a staircase and two ovens were found in the westernmost room, which according to the excavators likely served as a kitchen for baking the bread used in the liturgy.27 As will be evident, the Large East Church shares substantial typological similarities with Trimithis’ church, described in §5.1. On the basis of the coins and potsherds found there, it is datable to the first half of the fourth century. The Trimithis church, as part of the redevelopment of Area 2, can be dated to the latter years of that half-century or the 360s. Further evidence for the intensive growth of Christianity in the oasis was gathered a few years ago with the discovery of the ecclesiastical complex of ‘Ain el-Gedida, a site located a few km to the northwest of Kellis. This complex was identified and excavated, under my direction, between 2006 and 2008.28 Quite centrally situated on a large mound, it is easily accessible. Indeed, an extensive network of streets, comprising a main north–south axis plus smaller passageways and alleys, must have been quite effective in ancient times in shaping the movement of people around the hill and channeling them toward the church. This complex has two large rectangular rooms and another five interconnected spaces to the north and northwest and is surrounded by several other structures, including a large kitchen, a domestic dump, a ceramic workshop, and passageways (Fig. 105). The church itself occupies the southernmost space. It is oriented to the east and measures about 11.35 × 3.65 m, and was barrel-vaulted. Mud-brick benches line the north, west, and south walls of the room; a semicircular apse with an L-shaped pastophorion is set against the east wall (Fig. 106). The church was originally accessible from the north through two doorways, one near the northwest corner, and via a large central passageway along the north side. These connected the nave with a vaulted rectangular space, likely functioning as an assembly hall, with benches built against the north, east, and south walls. 27. Bowen 2002: 71. 28. Aravecchia 2012.

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Figure 105. Plan of the church at ‘Ain el-Gedida.

Against the south side of the central opening, inside the nave, is a stepped mud-brick podium accessible only from inside the church, that once enabled people in both rooms to see and hear the person—possibly a priest or a reader—standing on it. At some point, possibly due to a partial change of function of the room immediately to the north of the church, this passageway was closed, hindering access to the podium (Fig. 107). The assembly hall opens to the north onto a smaller and once barrel-vaulted rectangular anteroom. This space was used, at least in its latest occupation phase, for preparing food, as indicated by the discovery of a hearth and the imprints of several vessels on a platform and at floor level. A series of graffiti was found on the west and north walls, including two inscriptions—one in Greek and the other in Coptic—and some drawings of boats and a bird, among other subjects.

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Figure 106. ‘Ain el-Gedida, the church and the assembly hall (view to the west).

Figure 107. The podium inside the church at ‘Ain el-Gedida, with a bricked-in wall behind it (view to the north).

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One accesses the anteroom/kitchen from a long, roofless corridor running east–west to the north of the hall. This space ends on the east with a doorway that is the only entrance into the church complex from the outside. A narrow, vaulted passageway connects the anteroom with another, fairly large, space to the north. It was originally barrel-vaulted, and its outer walls form these buildings’ northwest boundary. Recessed into the south wall of this room, by its southeast corner, is a mud-brick feature that might have been used as a cupboard. It is possible that the room was a storage space for the anteroom/kitchen to the south. As mentioned earlier, the church of ‘Ain el-Gedida shares a considerable number of similarities with the Small East Church at Kellis—in particular, similar dimensions and an almost identical layout. We noticed differences, however, especially some dating from the later phases of alteration of the ‘Ain el-Gedida church.29 Furthermore, judging by the available ceramic, numismatic, and documentary evidence, the early-fourth-century dating of the Small East Church matches that of the ‘Ain el-Gedida complex.30 There was ample evidence available to prove the existence of different construction phases within the complex of ‘Ain el-Gedida. This includes the south wall of the church, irregularly laid out and clearly built at different times, and the whole semicircular apse with its L-shaped pastophorion, added later. There are also clear traces of foundation walls below floor level, belonging either to previous buildings or to earlier building phases of the church and the adjacent hall. Studying the relationships between each wall and those neighboring it revealed how the buildings had been significantly altered in the west and north sections, some rooms having been substantially changed and new ones added. The seating capacity of the church and of the assembly hall was more than seventy, or over eighty including the anteroom. This estimate does not take into account, of course, any individuals who might have stood in the church or the hall or those who accessed the complex merely to carry out more practical tasks in the other rooms. Considering not only the small-to-average size of the church and of the entire complex, but also the seemingly limited extent of the settlement—especially compared to nearby sites such as Kellis—this adds up to a considerable number of people. 29. For example, with the bricking-in of the central doorway. 30. Bowen 2003a: 164.

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An intriguing question concerns the nature of the rooms that were altered to build the latest stage of the complex: namely, did they function as a church before their westward expansion and the addition of an apse to the sanctuary? In the first centuries of Christianity, groups gathered to worship in domestic buildings—the basilica form would be adopted around the time of Constantine. Indeed, the existence of such domus ecclesiae is attested archaeologically in the ancient world, including in Dakhla, as mentioned above in relation to the Small East Church at Kellis. Therefore, even though there is no evidence to support it, we cannot rule out the possibility that religious ceremonies were carried out in these spaces at ‘Ain el-Gedida before their enlargement and/or the construction of the apse. In addition to the rich archaeological evidence from Kellis, ‘Ain elGedida and Trimithis (as discussed in §5.1), other sites in the Dakhla Oasis testify to the existence of Christian communities throughout Late Antiquity. The 1977–1987 Dakhleh Oasis Project survey listed two churches whose substantial remains are still visible above ground level. One is at the site of Deir Abu Matta, about eight km southeast of ancient Trimithis. The area of visible archaeological remains, which had already been noted by H. E. Winlock in 1908,31 is fairly limited and is currently surrounded by patches of desert, cultivated fields, and a paved road. In 1980, DOP members surveyed the mound on which the church stands and dug some test trenches inside the basilica.32 An archaeological project involving the investigation of the church and its adjacent structures began in 2007, under the direction of Gillian Bowen.33 The church is the site’s largest visible building. Oriented eastward, it is rectangular and measures 24 × 10.35 m. The mud-brick walls are nowadays the most impressive features, being over one meter thick and still standing several meters above ground level (Fig. 108). They were built in sections and originally supported a beamed roof, as suggested by the holes piercing the south wall. The church’s interior is in very poor condition nowadays, but its layout is roughly discernible. According to a plan drawn by Peter Grossmann, the church was originally divided by two rows of six square pillars into a nave and two side-aisles, with an additional L-shaped pillar at the west end.34 A return aisle along the west 31. Winlock 1936: 24; pls. 12–13. 32. Mills 1981: 185. 33. Bowen 2008; 2009; 2012. 34. Grossmann 2002: plan 180.

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Figure 108. Deir Abu Matta, external walls of the church (view to the west).

side joined the two colonnades by means of two more square pillars, forming an ambulatory around the central nave. A bench runs along the north section of the west wall. Another bench, no longer visible, was once located against the south wall. Evidence of a fairly narrow door— possibly a secondary entrance—was detected toward the west end of the north wall. The sanctuary, in the shape of a triconch, is to be found inside the church along its east wall; it was once framed by two engaged pillars. To the sides of the lateral conches, against the northeast and southeast corners of the building, are L-shaped side-rooms (pastophoria). The test trenches dug along the north wall revealed numerous early Christian burials, although some of them, at least those excavated in more recent years, were found disturbed. Considerable evidence of different construction phases in the area of the church has been documented since 2008. Architectural features predating the basilica are visible to the north of it, possibly extending further south. Other walls—later than the church, according to the excavator—were found to the north and west. A wide, tower-like building was also excavated to the west of the basilica. It is possible that at least some of the structures found near the church were associated with a small monastic establishment, whose existence in Late Antiquity is suggested by the modern name of the site.

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Figure 109. Deir el-Molouk, church plan (after Grossmann 2002, plan 181).

According to the DOP team’s survey, fifth-century coins, along with ceramics datable from the fifth to seventh century, were collected during the survey and the test excavation. The finds collected during the 2008– 2009 excavations, which include coins, ceramics, and an ostrakon, were largely of the fourth/fifth century CE, although some of the ceramics may be sixth-century. This means it is possible that the church of Deir Abu Matta was built significantly earlier than previously thought. The other church mentioned in the survey is that of Deir el-Molouk, a few km northwest of Masara.35 It was built of mud bricks and had a cruciform shape (Fig. 109). A domed roof was at its center, and there was an entrance, the surveyors reported, along the poorly preserved north wall. The church was divided into nine square spaces by four central cruciform pillars. Against the east wall were three apses with small niches, and three more conches were located at the centers of the north, 35. Mills 1981: 184–5; pls. X–XI; Grossmann 2002: 566–7; plan 181.

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west, and south walls, emphasizing the building’s cruciform shape. To the south of the church, and built against it, was a square room ending with a semicircular apse along its east side. This space, unconnected with the main building, was accessible through a narrow room outside the south apse. The south room, bearing traces of painted plaster, was possibly built shortly after the church itself and functioned as part of the same structure. The complex, measuring about 17.5 × 15.5 m (including both the church and the south room), shows evidence of architectural alterations, which include the addition of later walls near the southwest corner of the church and the entrance to the south room. There is insufficient evidence to determine whether the church originally stood in isolation or among other buildings. The dating of the church, too, is uncertain. However, the data gathered from the test trenching, and from examining the church’s layout, suggest a significantly later construction period for the Deir el-Molouk church than for the others excavated or surveyed in Dakhla. In 2009, Kamel Bayoumi of Dakhla’s Islamic and Coptic Inspectorate found another church, this one at the site of ‘Ain es-Sabil, less than 1.5 km southwest of the archaeological site of Kellis. The church, which is oriented to the east, shows a basilical plan with a central nave and two side-aisles, defined by two rows of four mud-brick columns each, and a west return aisle. The entire church complex measures roughly 17 × 26 m, and the church proper about 9.4 × 10.6. The apse is rectangular and framed by two semi-columns. An arched niche is set into the sanctuary’s north and south walls, which open onto side pastophoria through small doorways. The church at ‘Ain es-Sabil has not yet been published and no archaeological data are available. From the typological viewpoint, the building appears to share some similarities with the church at Trimithis and the Large East Church at Kellis, both datable to the mid-fourth century. A similar chronology for the church of ‘Ain es-Sabil is further supported by Rodney Ast and Roger Bagnall’s analysis of documentary evidence that was found by the excavators in a complex adjoining the church. On the whole the archaeological and documentary evidence for the growth and flourishing of Christianity in Dakhla has, since the end of the twentieth century, become quite substantial. Excavations at Kellis, ‘Ain el-Gedida, and Trimithis have revealed how Dakhla embraced Christianity, together with its artistic and architectural manifestations, from an early stage—since at least the early fourth century CE. They

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also tell us that Christianity was by then not just a phenomenon of the larger cities and towns, such as Trimithis, Mut, and Kellis, but a universal reality that encompassed the entire Egyptian society, including the small rural villages and even the most isolated hamlets of the oasis.

6 Economy and Society in the Roman Oasis 6.1. The oasis economy Roger S. Bagnall

The oases of Egypt occupied a distinctive and challenging ecological niche (see §1.3), or perhaps better niches. Of the five main oases, Siwa stood apart for its close connection to Libya and its distance from the world of the Nile valley. Extensive remains of production facilities, however, show that it produced wine and olive oil like the other oases. The Small Oasis, today’s Bahariya, seems to have been almost entirely devoted to fruit crops, as indeed it is today. It had close ties to the Fayyum and, especially, to Oxyrhynchos. Much of our evidence for it comes from the papyri from Oxyrhynchos, but active fieldwork in the past decade is starting to enrich our picture of its agricultural, religious, and military dimensions. About Roman Farafra, we know very little, not even what it was called. What today we call the Kharga and Dakhla Oases were administratively combined in the ancient Great Oasis. That linkage, partly paralleled in the contemporary term “New Valley” (which also includes Farafra) has much to recommend it, as Kharga and Dakhla are closer to each other (about 180 km between the chief towns) than to the Nile, are part of the same depression in the desert plateau, were economically very similar, and share many characteristics in their textual and artifactual output. The principal communication routes ran from Dakhla through Kharga to the Nile valley, with an alternative direct route, and from Dakhla 149

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through Farafra to Bahariya and on to Siwa. The Dakhla–Kharga–Nile axis was certainly the more important of these. If the inhabitants of the Great Oasis were to live above the level of subsistence farming, they needed many things they did not produce, notably metals, but also finer and harder stones, papyrus, and luxuries like the fine glassware found at Kellis, fish sauce, and other foods not available locally. In addition, the population had to pay taxes to the Roman government, and to the extent that this cash was not locally recycled, it had to be earned. There were only two routes to acquiring the means to pay for those goods and taxes. One was to export something, or things, that were valuable enough to be sold profitably in the Nile valley, even after the cost of transporting them across 365 km of desert had been met; the other was to have a strategic or prestige value that would motivate the ruling power to supply the oases, even at a loss to itself. The second of these certainly explains much of the activity in the Eastern Desert of Egypt during the Roman period: the quarrying of granodiorite at Mons Claudianus, porphyry at Mons Porphyrites, and other expensive stones and gems at other sites, about which much more is known now than was the case a quarter-century ago.1 Acquired at vast expense out of Imperial resources, these stones were needed for Imperial building projects or destined for consumption by the wealthy. The situation as regards the trade routes via the two main ports, Myos Hormos and Berenike, to points south and east, above all to India, is slightly more complex. There was a highly profitable and well taxed luxury trade, in both directions, that furnished a market basis for the large Imperial investment in roads, stations, and ports.2 In the Western Desert, there was probably some comparable justification to do with prestige and rarity for the exploitation of the region under the Old Kingdom, when expeditions scoured the landscape for valuable mineral products. How else could the elaborate relays of donkeys necessary to cross such an expanse of desert have been maintained? The best-known Old Kingdom site in Dakhla, ‘Ain Asil, was certainly a royal project that at best could have covered its operating costs if its activities had been confined within the oasis. In the Roman period, there is no sign of any Imperial interest in such high-value minerals in the Western Desert. On the other hand, the alum resources in Kharga and Dakhla 1. See Bagnall and Rathbone 2004: 285–8; Sidebotham, Hense, and Nouwens 2008. 2. Sidebotham 2011.

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were exploited—mainly through shallow mining, it appears.3 Alum, used as a mordant in cloth dyeing, was an Imperial monopoly, but at the same time it was a highly valuable product enjoying a broad market and may have been a significant component in what made Dakhla profitable at this time. But it is hard to see how it can account for the enormous agricultural growth in the oasis, because the manpower needed for alum extraction would not have been large. Nor, for that matter, is it easy to see why demand should have been so much greater in the Roman period than before, even with a rise in textile production. It hardly seems a good candidate for an important vector of change. The major technological change that made the Great Oasis more viable as a destination and a source of wealth had in fact taken place long before, with the introduction of the camel into the Western Desert. We do not have an exact date for this change. The camel seems to have reached Egypt before the Saite period, but the earliest mention in any text from the Saharan region probably dates to the fifth century BCE, during the Persian domination, in a demotic ostrakon from ‘Ain Manawir in the Kharga Oasis.4 We do not, as far as I know, have any secure archaeological confirmation of the camel’s presence here at an earlier date, but it is possible that it arrived under the Saites or even earlier. Unlike donkeys, the animal can cross the desert without an elaborate network of stations and wells for frequent watering. A camel could go from the Nile valley to Kharga or Dakhla without any intermediate food or water stops, if none were available. (This is not to say that it will not drink more frequently when possible.) The impact of this fact on the economic realities of crossing the desert was dramatic. Not only does the camel not need to make fueling stops, neither does it need to use part of its payload to carry fuel—that is, food and water—although probably in most cases some fodder would have been brought along. It is not only a matter of having replaced a shortrange aircraft with a long-haul jet, but as if one had invented an airplane able to use all of its payload for cargo. The fact that the number and wealth of settlements in both parts of the Great Oasis, as well as in the Small, or Bahariya, Oasis, rise very sharply during the Saite and Persian periods is very likely to be the result in large part of the introduction of the camel as the main freight-carrying vehicle. In Kharga, in fact, growth 3. See Picon, Vichy, and Ballet 2005. 4. http://www.achemenet.fr/fr/tree/?/sources-textuelles/textes-par-langues-et-ecritures/egyptien-hieroglyphique-et-demotique/ayn-manawir/ostraca-d-ayn-manawir#set

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during the Persian period is even more striking than in Dakhla. But all of this means that the camel was, at all events, no novelty in the Roman period. The camel is thus necessary to explain the Roman takeoff, but not sufficient. This condition had been satisfied more than four centuries before the Romans arrived. We must ask: What did the oases produce, or what could they have produced, that would be profitable when transported all the way to the valley by camel? And, even more important, why did their production of it in Roman times assume so much larger dimensions than in the Saite, Persian, and Ptolemaic periods? A significant part of the answer emerges from the Kellis Agricultural Account Book, the 1786-line account of receipts and outlays over three years, kept by the steward of part of a large estate during the 360s.5 According to my analysis of this account, it showed a two-part estate economy. One part consisted of crops grown for local consumption by humans or animals, or for disbursement in payment for services rendered—mainly wheat, barley, fodder crops, and wine. The other part was provided by high-value tree crops: olives, mainly in the processed form of olive oil; dates; figs; and jujubes. In the account, these last are not expended locally, so this part of the estate’s income seems to constitute its effective surplus. What all of these products have in common is that they could have been transported to the valley by camel without their cost to the purchaser there being increased by more than 10–20 percent above the production expense, or at any rate their market value in the oasis, compared to the more than doubling of cost that would have taken place in the case of bulk commodities like wheat or wine. Just like Roman Tripolitania, as analyzed by David Mattingly,6 Roman Dakhla apparently experienced an olive-oil boom. The rich archaeobotanical evidence from Kellis corroborates this picture. The hundreds of ostraka now yielded by the house of Serenos at Trimithis are generally in accord with this overall picture, although they cannot offer the kind of synoptic picture of estate management that we find in a comprehensive account book. Instead, they show us many dozens of snapshots of individual economic acts: deliveries of hay in one set of accounts; many tiny ostraka used as tags, set in jar stoppers (made of mud) atop containers of wine or oil, giving at most a year, a place, and a personal name; receipts for hay or barley used as donkey feed; letters 5. Bagnall 1997. 6. Most accessibly in Mattingly 1994.

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Figure 110. An ostrakon used as a tag in a jar stopper.

requesting the provision of olive oil or wine (Fig. 110). Archaeobotanical evidence is not as well preserved at Trimithis as at Kellis and is still under study, but it is in general consistent with what is found at Kellis. In effect, we are seeing much the same agricultural structure and range of crops as in the Kellis accounts, but from different vantage points, and no doubt more of the local-consumption side of the ledger than of the surplus for export.7 This agricultural structure included a landlord, in our case Serenos, whose home is referred to as “the house” throughout the texts, along with his wife the oikodespoina, “mistress of the household,” never named; a set of landholdings centered around wells in the nearby countryside; and a system for collecting at least part of the produce centrally, evidently at 7. Bagnall and Ruffini 2012 (O.Trim. 1): 37–41; finds and analysis since that discussion will be found in O.Trim. 2.

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Trimithis itself. At least one ostrakon shows that the wells themselves were an important part of the property portfolio, as had been the case in Dakhla since the Old Kingdom, with farmers paying regular amounts of rental per day of water supply. The exact nature of the settlements around the wells is not usually made explicit, but they are called by the Egyptian word for “water” or “well”, pmoun, “the water of,” followed by a name or description. The ostraka in the first volume resulting from the Amheida excavations contain more than forty such pmoun names. In many cases, the Greek word hydreuma, “well,” appears, rather pleonastically, before pmoun, which for Greek-speaking people no doubt had come to be part of the name rather than a mere descriptor. This description based on the ostraka tallies fairly well with the picture drawn from the Kellis account. There is one difference of standpoint that increasingly strikes me in looking at not only the ostraka referring to the activities of Serenos’ household in B1, but also those deriving from other households and used as fill under Serenos’ house and the adjoining street. In the Kellis account we see goods of all kinds coming into the possession of the pronoetes, the manager who is the “I” of that account, and only some of them going out as disbursements. In the ostraka from Trimithis, by contrast, the goods that were consumed locally are overwhelmingly dominant—that is, grains and especially wine. The greater visibility of wine is easily explained: grain traveled in sacks, wine in jars with labels set into the stoppers. The dominance of consumables in the Trimithis documentation is probably to be explained by the fact that our ostraka come from Serenos’ city house, where the family lived and things were consumed, rather than from a storehouse where goods for export would be concentrated. But since the publication of the Kellis Agricultural Account Book, the picture has also been complicated in a different way. The account book also records cotton, although not in very large quantities. Now, however, we find mentions of rather large amounts of cotton in a few ostraka from Trimithis too, and it is becoming clear that cotton production was no small-scale enterprise. I showed in a recent article that all of our papyrological evidence for cotton production in Roman Egypt comes from or concerns the western oases;8 it was also being grown in Lower Nubia around Qasr Ibrim, as John Peter Wild has demonstrated.9 But the Nile valley in Egypt seems not at that time to show any signs of 8. Bagnall 2008. 9. Wild, Wild, and Clapham 2007.

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cotton-growing—and this is actually no surprise but a near-inevitability, for cotton is a summer crop, and Egypt’s arable land was not available during most of the summer because it was under water. Only after the Nile’s flood receded could the land be sown with winter crops, especially wheat and barley, which grew well in basins moistened by the flood. In the oases, by contrast, as we noted earlier, water flowed, but did not flood, 365 days a year. It would thus have been perfectly possible to grow cotton in the oases during the summer on the land that in winter produced wheat or fodder crops. Moreover, that two-season advantage was not limited to cotton. Tosha Dupras has shown that the bone collagen of Kellis residents buried in the cemeteries of that village contains an isotope of carbon that cannot derive from the staple carbohydrates that are typical of the ancient Old World diet—that is, wheat and barley—but rather must involve maize, which as a New World crop not known in Egypt until modern times is out of the question in this context, or millet.10 And in fact, millet has been found in significant quantities at Kellis, although it is never mentioned in the documents from any of the oases, and only in one passage of Olympiodorus (FHG 4.64.33), pointed out many years ago by Guy Wagner.11 Olympiodorus tells us that millet is sometimes sowed three times a year in the oasis. We do not know if it was eaten by the people of Kellis; it is very rarely mentioned in the papyri from the Nile valley, either, and it does not seem to have been a valued part of the Egyptian diet, despite its high nutritional value and easy cooking. But its consumption could be an oasis peculiarity. Even more likely, perhaps, is that it was absorbed indirectly, through feeding it to animals whose meat or milk was then consumed by humans. But either way, it was obviously another crop that could be grown in the summer and thus allow the land to produce two crops a year, or even, as Olympiodorus says, three. Some interesting conclusions may be drawn. First, the possibility of producing two crops a year could have helped offset the remoteness of the oases from the valley. The additional income would essentially compensate for the overhead on oasis production caused by transportation costs, eliminating the built-in disadvantage that the distance of the oases from the valley gave them. Second, neither cotton nor millet is known in 10. Dupras, Schwarcz, and Fairgrieve 2008. The difference between American usage of “corn” to refer to maize and British usage to mean “grain” can give rise to confusion, but maize has never been found in an archaeological context in Egypt. 11. Wagner 1987: 288, pointing out that millet was still grown in the Great Oasis, especially in south Kharga, in the twentieth century.

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Egypt before Roman times, as far as I can determine. Their introduction may be a key, along with the increasing consumption of olive oil, to the attractiveness of the oases as places for investment in land development in the early Roman period. Seen in this light, the oases can have profited from a two-part strategy: on the one hand, self-sufficiency in essential foodstuffs, of which they grew just enough to feed themselves and their animals; on the other, a highly export-dependent focus that tied them into a globalized economy in high-value tradable commodities: in their case, as we have seen, particularly olive oil, cotton, and the more traditional dates, figs, and jujubes—along with alum, in all likelihood. The ability to implement such a dual strategy would have constituted a remarkable competitive advantage for the oases. The one caveat I would offer is that Bahariya Oasis, the Small Oasis of the papyri, probably was not self-sufficient in cereals. Because it was both much smaller and nearer to the valley than Dakhla, the resulting need to import was not as significant a cost for Bahariya. We have a considerable amount of evidence from customs declarations and letters of the Roman period showing that wheat was sent to the Small Oasis from the Fayyum and from Oxyrhynchos.12 It was more expensive in the oasis than in the valley, but not enough to make the economics of growing wheat in that oasis attractive. Even today, Bahariya is almost totally dominated by fruit crops. An export-based economy located at a great distance from the Nile entailed an extensive land transportation industry. The ostraka are saturated with mentions of donkeys, mainly employed in local transportation aimed at concentrating the surplus in the hands of the landlord and seeing that provisions get to those who need them. They also mention camels and camel drivers often enough to show their presence, but records concerning how the surplus was sold and moved to the valley have not come to light at any of the excavated sites so far, just as they are largely lacking in the papyrus-producing cities of the valley. But just as we glimpse in the ostraka from the Eastern Desert the outlines of a large corps of camel and donkey drivers based in Coptos, so we can infer the existence of a similar body of men who moved the oil, cotton, dates, figs, and alum from the oases to the valley. In the case of Dakhla, this may have meant Lykopolis (modern Assiut), but there were routes also to the Panopolite (now Akhmim), the Hermopolite, and to the Antaiopolite; and it is probable that the cross-desert caravan route sent many fingers out into the valley cities. 12. Bagnall 2008.

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6.2. A rural settlement in the oasis system Nicola Aravecchia

The bedrock of this dual agricultural system in the oases was the production center built around a well. Such hamlets have not been the object of serious archaeological investigation until recently, and only in the oases do they survive well enough to be studied in depth. One of these agricultural centers is ‘Ain el-Gedida, in the central part of the Dakhla Oasis. It was always substantially smaller than the oasis cities and towns such as Trimithis, Mut, and Kellis. But precisely for this reason, ever since the very first excavations there in the mid-1990s, ‘Ain el-Gedida has sparked interest among scholars working in the region. They noticed the unusual layout of the remains and were intrigued by questions concerning the nature of the site and the role it had played within the religious, administrative, and economic systems of the oasis during Late Antiquity.13 These questions led to new excavations, carried out between 2006 and 2008 under my direction. This investigation enabled us to gather a considerable amount of data, which answered some of those questions and added to our knowledge of the social and economic organization of rural Dakhla. ‘Ain el-Gedida lies three km north of the village of Masara and is bounded to the north by an escarpment and a narrow strip of desert land, with two rocky mounds as its most striking topographical features. All around are cultivated fields, now dangerously encroaching upon the current edges of the site (Fig. 111). The area is dotted with numerous bushes and trees, including palm trees, which grow there thanks to the easy availability of water. Indeed, the name ‘Ain el-Gedida means “the new spring”, pointing to the relative wealth of water in the area as the reason for its use as cultivated land. There is a strong likelihood that the modern name coincides with the ancient one, if we may judge from a Greek ostrakon found during the 2008 excavation. This mentions Pmoun Berri, a toponym meaning “the new well”, which is the precise equivalent of the modern Egyptian name ‘Ain el-Gedida. The archaeological remains are spread over five mounds, of which one (Mound I) is substantially more extensive than the other four (Fig. 112). The mounds are close to each other except for Mound V, which lies over 200 m from the main one. It is difficult to establish the overall dimensions of the site. In fact, the adjacent cultivated fields likely cover 13. Bayoumi 1998: 57–62.

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Figure 111. ‘Ain el-Gedida, Google site view (to the northwest) with archaeological plan superimposed.

Figure 112. Site map of ‘Ain el-Gedida.

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Figure 113. ‘Ain el-Gedida, southern half of the main mound (view to the northeast).

a portion of the ancient remains. This makes it hard to assess whether the zones between and around the five mounds were densely built up, forming a continuum with the mounds, or whether there were separate clusters of buildings on each mound. Also, the heavily disturbed context of Mound V complicates the situation, making it impossible to establish its outline with any degree of precision. We detected and surveyed the remains on all the mounds, but focused our excavating on the main one. The southern half of this mound, investigated in the mid-1990s by an Egyptian mission led by Kamel Bayoumi, gives the impression of having developed from a smaller, centrally located core of buildings into a larger complex extending toward the mound’s edges (Fig. 113). We found unambiguous archaeological evidence that architectural features had been added to earlier structures, which had often been substantially altered. These rooms generally demonstrated a very poor building technique and no systematic plan. They did not form separate clusters—in fact, we recognized no easily identifiable domestic units in this area—but were interconnected in a complex network extending over most of the southern part of the hill. The hasty construction of these buildings suggests, as Bayoumi has argued on the basis of the first excavations at ‘Ain el-Gedida, that they were designed to satisfy the needs of a rapidly increasing population.14 Unfortunately, most of the structures cannot be reliably identified as far as their original function or functions are concerned. More 14. Bayoumi 1998: 58.

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firmly recognizable as storage magazines are a set of three narrow rooms symmetrically placed at the southwest corner of Mound I (Fig. 114). These spaces typically have low walls, whose original height can be inferred from the scanty remains of the vault springings, and clay containers set into the original floor, likely used to store crops. Particularly worth mentioning is a large room set in a central position immediately north of the three rooms just described. This space, which seems to have been roofless even in antiquity, was once connected via a long corridor to the central and north part of the mound, although at some point a staircase obstructed the passage into this corridor.15 The room was identified as a kitchen after the discovery of substantial remains of at least three bread ovens (Fig. 115). These were circular ceramic features, built on a raised earth platform and surrounded by mud-brick partition walls. The dimensions of the kitchen/bakery and the presence of the ovens suggest that this facility satisfied not just the needs of one family, but likely those of a fairly large group of people. Our 2006–2008 work focused on the central and north parts of the main hill. A surface clearance of this area revealed a network of several buildings, of various sizes and some interconnected. Although the general layout gives the impression of a rather confused spatial arrangement, we identified traces of more regular planning. Sets of interconnected rooms, some opening onto spaces that seem to have been inner courtyards, formed larger, roughly rectangular blocks divided by streets (Fig. 116). A remarkably large rectangular building is located at the north edge of the hill. This structure, which was not excavated, comprises two rectangular rooms lying at the center of a wide, also rectangular, feature. Comparing this with similar buildings in Dakhla, for example at Kellis and ‘Ain es-Sabil, suggests the complex was a columbarium, or pigeon tower, a typical feature of the oasis landscape in Roman times and during Late Antiquity, just as their descendants are today.16 A few meters to the south of the columbarium, and centrally positioned within the mound, lies the church complex discussed in Chapter 5.17 Excavated between 2006 and 2007, it represents one of the site’s most significant archaeological discoveries. The investigation also extended to the area immediately to the south and east of the church, with the goal of ascertaining the topographical relationship of the complex 15. The reasons are yet unknown. 16. The plan of a columbarium is published in Hope and Whitehouse 2006: 315. 17. Aravecchia 2012.

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Figure 114. Storerooms in the southern half of the main mound at ‘Ain el-Gedida (view to the northwest).

Figure 115. A kitchen in the southern half of the main hill (view to the east).

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Figure 116. Plan of the main hill at ‘Ain el-Gedida.

with the surrounding buildings and passageways. Among these is a long street, running from north to south along the east side of the church complex. The street narrows where the apse, built against the east wall at a later time, protrudes into the street itself. Further east is a small openair industrial area, with evidence of several bread ovens—not dissimilar from the large kitchen with multiple ovens found in the southern part of the mound. A barrel-vaulted passageway runs east–west along the south wall of the church, intersecting, at its east end, with the same street. An

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Figure 117. An excavated area to the south of the church complex (aerial view to the southwest).

open courtyard is situated there, showing signs of clay and mud-brick features possibly associated with feeding animals (Fig. 117).18 We retrieved a substantial amount of pottery, including thousands of fragments and some complete vessels.19 Small objects such as cups, bowls, and plates prevail over larger containers, although some of the larger ones were found in most contexts. All these vessels share a character consistent with a domestic assemblage in a fairly poor rural environment, which is also suggested by the other archaeological evidence. The ceramic material, with few exceptions, points to a fairly homogeneous chronological framework spanning the early fourth to (at the latest) the beginning of the fifth century CE. The documentary evidence, in the form of Greek and Coptic ostraka and more than one hundred and fifty coins found at ‘Ain el-Gedida—again with very few exceptions such as earlier coins found in contexts of dubious reliability— supports a fourth-century dating. Although ceramic and numismatic remains pointing to phases of occupation earlier than the fourth century were scanty, to say the 18. Reddé 2004: 25, 207. 19. Dixneuf 2012.

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Figure 118. ‘Ain el-Gedida, remains of the temple/ceramic workshop (view to the north).

least, it became clear that the previous evidence did not give the full picture when in 2008 a large building complex was investigated near the west edge of the main hill. This complex lies to the west of a room that was used, at least in its latest phase, as a dump for domestic waste. The building measures 18.5 m north–south and 7.1 m east–west; its east walls are preserved to a maximum height of over 2 m, while the north and west parts have been subject to particularly severe destruction and erosion (Fig. 118). The inside face of the east wall is characterized by ten regularly spaced niches; it is likely that the west wall was niched as well, but it is not preserved to the height at which the niches would have been placed. The discovery of bins and large basins inside the largest room, as well as of partially worked clay, several sherds of unbaked pots, and two large fragments of potter’s wheels, identified the complex, in its late phase of occupation, as a pottery workshop. However, a study of the original layout, which did not include the internal partition walls in the large courtyard, led to a different

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interpretation for the earlier phase. In fact, the building was originally a small mud-brick temple, with a large courtyard characterized by long niched walls leading northward into a sequence of pronaos and naos, both flanked by two longer rectangular rooms symmetrically arranged. Abundant comparative evidence exists to substantiate this identification. One of the closest parallels is the unexcavated temple of El-Qusur, at Tineida in the east of Dakhla,20 which shows a very similar layout to the original plan of the west complex of ‘Ain el-Gedida, including long niched walls in the large rectangular courtyard. The discovery of a pagan temple at ‘Ain el-Gedida, later converted into a small industrial establishment, was a significant event. Indeed, it undoubtedly testifies to a longer history of occupation of the site, which must have begun at a time when traditional Egyptian religion was still in full flower. It is obvious that the temple must have been built some time before its conversion into a pottery workshop, this latter probably datable to the same time as the church complex, that is to say, the first half of the fourth century. This means that the site must have been occupied since at least the second century CE, and certainly by the mid-third, when the building of pagan temples seems mostly to have ended in Egypt. Why was ‘Ain el-Gedida abandoned sometime during the last thirty years or so of the fourth century or the beginning of the fifth? The evidence suggests no episode of violent destruction that might have led the inhabitants to leave the site abruptly. No objects of significant value were found in the rooms that were excavated, suggesting that the buildings in the settlement had been emptied by their owners of anything worth taking. Perhaps the site was abandoned not because of some sudden, to us unknowable, incident, but was a planned departure—arranged quickly but not so quickly that the villagers could not sort their possessions and take with them anything they wanted. This is something that we see at several other sites in the oasis. Scholars have debated possible causes, such as climate change, economic depression, or political unrest. At any rate, notwithstanding possible economic and social changes taking place at ‘Ain el-Gedida, the reasons that led all its inhabitants, as well as those of other sites, to abandon their homes and move elsewhere—where, we do not know—are not yet clear. Since the Egyptian team’s excavations of the mid-1990s, another possibility concerning the nature of the site has been mooted. As already mentioned, the south half of the main hill is characterized by an unusual 20. Winlock 1936: 17; pls. IX–X. A plan is also available in Kaper 1997: fig. 2.

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configuration comprising a network of closely interconnected buildings around a central open-air kitchen. This arrangement suggests a social structure based on communal living rather than separate households. The discovery of the church complex provided additional information in this regard. The existence of another large kitchen near the complex, and especially of the large assembly hall capable of seating a considerable number of people, seems also to point to the presence there of a community—people who were not organized in the manner of a family, either nuclear or extended. However, these data provide no clue as to who they were or where they came from. Neither the Egyptian nor the more recent excavations found any sizable structures at ‘Ain el-Gedida that could be identified as large dormitories—which one might have expected in light of the evidence for communal living just described—but neither did they discover incontrovertible evidence of houses for single families. The paucity of domestic-architecture remains at the site could be explained by the relatively limited area under investigation compared to the overall extent of the ancient settlement. Indeed, it cannot be ruled out that most people may have lived on the other mounds, while on the main hill stood mostly buildings of a more communal kind such as the church complex, small industrial installations including the large kitchens/bakeries, the storage rooms, and the ceramics workshop within the remains of the mud-brick temple. Obstacles to fully understanding the physical and social structure of the settlement apart, the current state of research does strongly suggest that ‘Ain el-Gedida had at this time an agriculture-based economy. As noted above, archaeological investigation of late antique Egyptian villages and hamlets has been very limited. On the other hand, documentary sources abound, shedding light on the economy, society, and daily life as well as on the links that country dwellers had with the rest of Egypt, especially with larger towns and cities. Roger Bagnall has analyzed the many aspects of life in fourthcentury villages, basing his study on the information supplied by written documents, on ostraka or papyrus, especially the archives of people involved in managing land.21 The picture that emerges is of a dynamic world heavily engaged in agriculture, involved in the economic, social, and political affairs of the time, and also in religious matters. Villagers would have worked in small industrial or craft areas related to the agricultural activities, which played a primary role in the economy of the 21. Bagnall 1993: 110–47.

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rural settlements. One could usually find, for instance, granaries, pigeon towers, open-air bakeries, and workshops for manufacturing objects of daily use, such as pottery. All these features have been identified on the main hill at ‘Ain el-Gedida, although some of them only tentatively. The kind of layout described above appears to have been fairly standard in Egyptian villages of the time. We know from the papyri that the rural settlements in late antique Egypt were not all full-scale villages. An alternative but associated type, attested to by numerous documentary sources although not yet by substantial archaeological evidence, consists of epoikia: that is to say, small rural centers connected to the management of large agricultural estates.22 Here, a workforce could be employed, full-time or seasonally, to work the land under the direction of overseers, in many cases alongside the tenants. It may be that workers moved to the estate and lived there for the duration of their contract. The spatial arrangement of these epoikia is unknown, because none has ever been identified and excavated. According to a reconstruction made by Dominic Rathbone, chiefly based on documentary evidence, epoikia consisted of buildings functionally associated with the agricultural activities carried out in the farmstead.23 Some Egyptian epoikia were created as isolated entities, later developing into regular villages, while others seem to have been integrated, from the start, into the territorial economies of existing villages. We should not assume that the people involved in the epoikia system necessarily led a fully communal lifestyle. In fact, it cannot be ruled out that wage workers may have moved to these rural settlements with their families, occupying houses similar to those found in other types of settlement. At ‘Ain el-Gedida, the south half of Mound I might well reflect the spatial arrangement of part of an epoikion, comprising not its residential quarters but a sector where the buildings more closely associated with agriculture were concentrated, including installations such as bakeries, built to satisfy the needs of a relatively large community. Within the context of an epoikion, we should not be surprised to find a church at the center of Mound I, largely consisting of utilitarian public spaces. Indeed, written sources attest to the possibility that churches were associated with this type of rural settlement.24 22. Bagnall 1993: 151. 23. Rathbone 1991: 22–43. 24. Sarris 2004: 284.

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More evidence prompting us to identify ‘Ain el-Gedida as an epoikion comes from an ostrakon found at the site in 2008 (already mentioned), which acknowledges the payment of money by someone described as “from the georgion of Pmoun Berri,” the latter being, we may suppose, the likely Egyptian name of ‘Ain el-Gedida in the fourth century. Here georgion appears to refer to a farmstead or agricultural settlement and, if indeed it refers to ‘Ain el-Gedida, thus establish the basic nature of that settlement. The evidence testifies to a vibrant rural community, well adapted to the local environment, taking advantage of what the surrounding land had to offer and processing its products on site. Furthermore, the small industrial workshops uncovered at ‘Ain el-Gedida shed light on a society whose involvement in the local economy extended beyond those activities strictly related to agriculture. Interestingly, it is also probable that, due to its smallness and its proximity to Kellis—and also its similar chronology—‘Ain el-Gedida was administratively dependent on its more sizable neighbor. Indeed, some documentary sources suggest there were strong links between the two settlements, just as there were with the somewhat larger ‘Ain esSabil. Our excavations at ‘Ain el-Gedida offer a direct, although partial, glimpse into several aspects of land management and exploitation and, more generally, into rural life in fourth-century Dakhla. Moreover, the discovery of what may be the first archaeologically attested epoikion has a potential significance stretching well beyond the oasis boundaries and giving us new and valuable insights for the study of rural society and economy in late antique Egypt.

6.3. Government and military Roger S. Bagnall

The countryside that produced Dakhla’s crops was from an administrative standpoint organized much as was the rest of Egypt, into subdivisions called toparchies and then, from 307/8, into pagi. In each of these districts there were a number of villages, kômai. Kellis itself and its important counterpart Mesobe, the location of which is not known, both had the juridical status of headquarters of a toparchy, and some other villages are mentioned more casually in the Kellis papyri without any clear indication of their status other than being villages. It is likely that Trimithis was also, during some part of its history, a village at the

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More evidence prompting us to identify ‘Ain el-Gedida as an epoikion comes from an ostrakon found at the site in 2008 (already mentioned), which acknowledges the payment of money by someone described as “from the georgion of Pmoun Berri,” the latter being, we may suppose, the likely Egyptian name of ‘Ain el-Gedida in the fourth century. Here georgion appears to refer to a farmstead or agricultural settlement and, if indeed it refers to ‘Ain el-Gedida, thus establish the basic nature of that settlement. The evidence testifies to a vibrant rural community, well adapted to the local environment, taking advantage of what the surrounding land had to offer and processing its products on site. Furthermore, the small industrial workshops uncovered at ‘Ain el-Gedida shed light on a society whose involvement in the local economy extended beyond those activities strictly related to agriculture. Interestingly, it is also probable that, due to its smallness and its proximity to Kellis—and also its similar chronology—‘Ain el-Gedida was administratively dependent on its more sizable neighbor. Indeed, some documentary sources suggest there were strong links between the two settlements, just as there were with the somewhat larger ‘Ain esSabil. Our excavations at ‘Ain el-Gedida offer a direct, although partial, glimpse into several aspects of land management and exploitation and, more generally, into rural life in fourth-century Dakhla. Moreover, the discovery of what may be the first archaeologically attested epoikion has a potential significance stretching well beyond the oasis boundaries and giving us new and valuable insights for the study of rural society and economy in late antique Egypt.

6.3. Government and military Roger S. Bagnall

The countryside that produced Dakhla’s crops was from an administrative standpoint organized much as was the rest of Egypt, into subdivisions called toparchies and then, from 307/8, into pagi. In each of these districts there were a number of villages, kômai. Kellis itself and its important counterpart Mesobe, the location of which is not known, both had the juridical status of headquarters of a toparchy, and some other villages are mentioned more casually in the Kellis papyri without any clear indication of their status other than being villages. It is likely that Trimithis was also, during some part of its history, a village at the

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head of a toparchy, although it seems that it was a polis by the fourth century—and proud of it, to judge from the personification of polis (city) standing in the corner of Room 1 in the house of Serenos (see §7.2) and watching the divine shenanigans going on in the paintings there.25 Beyond the larger villages, as already noted, were numerous places named after their well, found in both the Kellis account book and the ostraka from Trimithis, as well as in the Kellis papyri and ostraka. We know that some of these were referred to as epoikia, “settlements”, using a term well attested in the valley and discussed in the previous section with regard to ‘Ain el-Gedida.26 But the term epoikion is not always used even for places that we know were so designated, and it is entirely possible that some, even many, of the pmoun names in the documentation were in fact classified as epoikia in more official parlance. The oases today still show many remains of smaller rural settlements of the Roman period. As these have in general not been excavated, we are usually lacking the wherewithal to link them to the place names in the documents or to connect a particular physical manifestation with a verbal description. In §6.3 we describe the one such settlement to have been uncovered in Dakhla, ‘Ain el-Gedida. These settlements seem from a governmental viewpoint to have been dependent on the villages, but we have no direct evidence of how they were governed. Amheida certainly had such settlements in its vicinity, whether large or small. Many of them lurk in the pmoun names. Vestiges of these settlements can be found on the ground in the environs of Amheida. Not many km away is a field full of farm buildings, pigeon houses on the upper floors and storage underneath (see figure 22). ‘Ain es-Sabil, where the Ministry of Antiquities has found another fourth-century church (see §5.3), may have been a large example of the genre, if it was not a village; we do not yet know its ancient name—we have only scratched the surface in this respect. These oasis settlements certainly differed from their counterparts in the Nile valley, if only because their existence depended, unlike subsidiary agricultural enterprises in the valley, on having their own water source; and their size was essentially a product of the volume of that water source’s flow. But the same questions arise, especially whether they were fundamentally operated by wage labor, or by tenants, or by a 25. See Bagnall and Ruffini 2004. The date at which Trimithis became a polis is not known, and it may have come significantly before the fourth century. 26. Note Thio (P.Kell. 45), Pmoun Tametra (P.Kell. 41), and a couple of others whose names are not preserved (P.Kell. 8, P.Sijp. 11a).

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combination. The communal facilities at ‘Ain el-Gedida would certainly tend at first sight to push us in the direction of seeing this place as populated by wage laborers rather than permanently resident tenant families. As mentioned earlier, it is not yet clear to us what parts of the site were sleeping facilities and how these were configured, but there is little to remind us of the family-style houses we find at Kellis or Trimithis. One other point must be borne in mind. In Dakhla, the ezba, as such settlements are called in Arabic, was associated until relatively recent times with seasonality; the work there was done by people who lived in a larger village during most of the year but moved to the ezba without their families for the periods of intense seasonal agricultural work—planting, vineyard and orchard cultivation, harvest, the processing of fruit, and the storage of the products. Perhaps the people of ‘Ain el-Gedida did not form a discrete population at all but were in the main residents of Kellis who spent only part of the year in the georgion. In the case of the many pigeon-house/storehouse complexes near Amheida, there is nothing still visible that we might recognize as habitation, so they were quite likely dependent on a larger village or even the city itself to house most of the people, most of the time. The Great Oasis had an Imperial presence apart from the civilian officials who governed it. We know from the late antique list of provinces, officials, and military units known as the Notitia Dignitatum that Trimithis was the base of a cavalry unit called the Ala I Quadorum (“first wing of Quadi” [a people of the Danubian region reccruited into the Roman army]); and the military camp, ta kastra (the Greek word is a borrowing of the Latin castra), is mentioned in a fair number of documents from Kellis and in a graffito from a side-room of the pillared hall at Amheida (B6), excavated in 2011. But there is nothing at Amheida that looks anything like a military camp, and there was long among archaeologists working in Dakhla an instinct to think that the camp should have been at nearby El-Qasr—even though we know that the word qasr, although also derived from the Latin castrum, was applied to many places in the eastern Roman world that were not in fact castra, so it cannot be taken for granted that a Qasr had once been a castra. In 2006, Fred Leemhuis, who has for several years been doing conservation and reconstruction work on two of the larger Ottoman houses in El-Qasr, made an important discovery. He was walking one day toward an area where he was doing some trial excavation, in what he thinks is the oldest part of the town, when he noticed that a large

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and rather eroded wall along his path, probably originally part of the town wall, was built in bricks of a different size from that typical of the Islamic town. He had seen the wall many times, but it had taken a slightly different light to bring the lines dividing the bricks to his attention. The brick size was Roman, and he soon found a couple of other massive bastions built of the same bricks. More have now come to light elsewhere in this part of El-Qasr, and it seems to us beyond doubt that the reason we have not so far spotted anything at Amheida that looks even remotely like a fort for the Ala Quadorum is simply that the unit’s headquarters were located at El-Qasr, just a few km from the main urban district of Trimithis and obviously considered part of it, as well as closer to the main road to and from the Farafra Oasis. Moreover, the oldest part of El-Qasr looks like a Roman fort in plan. Further excavations by the Egyptian authorities have found more of the wall, and it now appears that El-Qasr was a fort of dimensions and shape more or less identical to those of El-Deir in Kharga, and indeed to other tetrarchic forts in Egypt. It was called pkastron nperro (“the imperial camp”) in Coptic, as we know from some ostraka excavated by our Egyptian colleagues.27 At the same time, we can now say with confidence that the garrison of Dakhla was more complex than the entry in the Notitia Dignitatum would suggest. As is increasingly acknowledged to be normal Roman practice, it included detachments from other units. One of these, the Tentyrites, turned up in an ostrakon found at Amheida in 2008; the second is the Legio II Traiana, represented by the mention of an “optio [a military rank] of Asphynis” in an ostrakon discovered in 2009. Asphynis, in the Latopolite nome in the Nile valley, is where this legion was stationed in the fourth century, as we know from a centurion’s will in the Columbia University papyrus collection.28 To these may be added an ostrakon found at ‘Ain el-Gedida, not far from Kellis, which is a receipt for annona (rations) for the hippotoxotai, horse-mounted archers, stationed at Mothis. So at least one of these units contained cavalry archers, no doubt useful in assuring the security of the desert roads. Perhaps these were the Tentyrites, since the Notitia indicates that equites sagittarii indigenae (“native cavalry archers”) were stationed at Tentyra. It is noteworthy that Dakhla has so far given little sign, on the surface, of the numerous small forts characteristic of Kharga. But this may be deceptive. Like the fort at El-Qasr, they may yet be found. 27. On the fort at El-Qasr, see Kucera 2012; Gardner 2012. 28. For a more detailed discussion of the garrison of Dakhla, see Ast and Bagnall forthcoming.

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One central question about the military is this: What was it doing in the oases? There is, as far as I know, no evidence at all for its presence in the Great Oasis before the Tetrarchy (Diocletian’s four-emperor regime, in office 293-305), and probably not in the Small Oasis either. It appears that the building of a series of fairly uniform forts at Qaret el-Tub in Bahariya, El-Deir in Kharga, and El-Qasr in Dakhla is part of the same wave of military construction in the late 280s, and continuing for a couple of decades, that we find elsewhere in Egypt.29 Nowhere is it clear whether there was any direct threat that we would describe as military, or whether instead we are dealing essentially with the assertion of control over lines of communication, plus perhaps a policing function. The building of forts in the Eastern Desert under Vespasian in the mid-70s, where before there had been unfortified stations, has been connected with the increasing nomadic raiding that is recorded in the ostraka from the station at Krokodilo, on the road from Coptos to the port of Myos Hormos.30 It is possible that the same thing was true of the Western Desert in the later third century—a much more difficult environment for nomads, but also for defenders, than the Eastern Desert, because water sources do not lie as near the surface in the Western Desert as in the Eastern, meaning that a dense network of stations based on wells is not feasible. The exposed lines across the desert were much longer in the west, and the forts are in any case in, or sometimes on the edges of, the oases rather than out in the open desert of the high plateau. It is, then, natural to wonder if the steep decline of the oasis settlements in the second half of the fourth century and beginning of the fifth is connected with greater insecurity. It will be clear that only secure transportation lines across the desert to the Nile valley can have enabled the existence of the economy that I have suggested earlier. There are, of course, other possible explanations for the decline, which have been canvassed from time to time. These include dwindling water supplies, the invasion of sand dunes, or the possibility that the decline is illusory and produced by our failure to recognize the later settlements archaeologically and to excavate them. There are good arguments against all of these hypotheses. First, the water supply is not likely to have failed in widely dispersed locations at the same time, and Mut and Amheida even today have fairly high humidity near the surface, even though throughout the oases water 29. See Kucera 2012 for references. 30. Bagnall, Bülow-Jacobsen, and Cuvigny 2001; O.Krok. 87–92.

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must in general be sought from much deeper wells than in antiquity. Second, sand dunes are local and never cover more than a fraction of any settlement at a given moment; one would not react to a dune invasion by abandoning a city or village, but by moving house to another neighborhood. Third, Dakhla is well surveyed, and the post-fourthcentury pottery is recognized. There is no good reason to think that our perception of occupation is seriously flawed. There are, after all, sites such as Deir Abu Matta, where occupation into the fifth century and perhaps later is known from the ceramic finds. El-Qasr seems to have been inhabited continuously from the third century until the present day. It is possible that the question of security, in this case, affected not so much the security of the oasis itself as that of the roads between the oasis and the valley. If we remember that the flourishing of the oases in Roman times seems likely to have depended very heavily on the ability to export goods in the production of which the oases had an advantage over the valley, we can see that even a modest reduction in the safety of the desert roads could have had a devastating impact on the oases’ economic viability. In his book on the oases, Guy Wagner cites a passage of the Christian writer John Moschus (112; PG 87C, 2976–8) in which a number of monks in the oasis were taken prisoner by marauding tribesmen called Mazikes.31 The dramatic date of the episode can be no later than the reign of Tiberius II (578–582). One of these monks was taken to Hibis, the capital of the other part of the Great Oasis (modern Kharga), in order to try to scrape together 24 solidi (one-third of a Roman pound of gold, or about 108 grams) to ransom a group of elderly and ailing monks. But the bishop there could find only 8 solidi, which the Mazikes refused, grabbing another, senior, monk instead. We have no way of assessing how typical this sixth-century vignette is, but it may point to a greater level of insecurity in late antiquity and, eventually, to an inability to sustain a society that depended on the security of its communications with the world of the Nile valley, hundreds of km away.

31. Wagner 1987: 397–8.

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6.4. Oasis society Roger S. Bagnall

The ostraka of Trimithis do not, at least so far, form a rich body of material for understanding the society of the oasis. Highly formulaic and almost without exception limited to one sort or another of economic affairs, they tell us nothing directly about most aspects of human life. Even the papyri from Kellis are uninformative about such basic questions as demography, marriage, and divorce. Nonetheless, the structural facts of economic life visible in both texts and archaeology force one to confront some essential aspects of oasis life during the Roman period, and to think about the consequences.32 At the most fundamental level, oasis society must have been highly unequal, almost certainly more unequal than the society of the Nile valley. The main reason is that the Roman development of the oasis required large amounts of capital deployed in expensive assets owned by private parties, and it was they who controlled the flow of water from the wells and thus the land made green by that water. Other people worked for them. We have little direct evidence of the relationship between the investors—some of whom, at least, were absentee owners—and those who worked their land. From the Kellis Agricultural Account Book it is clear that this relationship was constructed around the payment of rent, thus on a model of landlord and tenant. But the juridical nature of this landlord–tenant situation and how it was represented in legal documents are unknown; there are no land leases preserved among the Kellis papyri, nor do we have any labor contracts. Also, the ‘Ain el-Gedida ostraka tend to suggest rent rather than wages as the main payment stream, but we cannot hope to recover any precision about the ways and means. Dakhla thus seems to have had little equivalent to the small and middling landholders who formed the core of Egyptian village society in the valley. This is not to say that the valley did not have its share of landless tenants, but that Dakhla was home to very few, if any, of the historic “royal” farmers, tenants of pharaoh’s land who had long-term possession and who probably, in the main, at some point under Roman rule, came to own that land. 32. Some issues and observations in this section are drawn from part of a chapter I wrote for a forthcoming book on Kellis edited by Colin A. Hope. For Egyptian society in late antiquity more generally, see Bagnall 1993.

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Before we conjure up too stark a picture of oasis society as a grossly unbalanced barbell, however, we need to turn the spotlight on some other groups. One such group was engaged in animal husbandry, management, and transportation. As is clear from the oasis landscape and the physical relationship of the oasis to the valley, a very large number of donkeys and camels were required for the entire system to function. People had to raise these animals, take care of them, and drive them on their appointed rounds. There were a lot of onelatai, donkey drivers, and kamelitai, camel drivers, in the oases, far more than in most valley communities. Second, agricultural commodities needed to be processed. With food crops, most of this work was surely carried out by the farmers, the same people who raised the crops. But there must also have been some professional millers. Even more demanding was the processing of cotton and probably of some quantity of flax as well. These products in their raw state are bulky and awkward to transport, and flax needs processing soon after harvest. The work needed to be done locally. Spinners and weavers were required. More visible to us in the texts, however, are the managers. These men are the keys to the functioning of the entire system. They use a language of collegiality in addressing one another, but one should not mistake this for an absence of hierarchy. Even the top echelon of oasis society, like Serenos, who was a member of the local civic elite, were estate managers for someone. The absentee Faustianus, son of Aquila, the landlord of the property at the center of the Kellis Account Book, lived in Hibis; whether he was in turn the manager for someone richer still and perhaps resident in the valley, we do not know. A host of lower-level managers turn up in the ostraka from Trimithis, Kellis, and ‘Ain es-Sabil. It was they who assured the communication of orders from the main population centers to the hydreumata, the transportation of goods in both directions, and the record-keeping necessary for these large enterprises to thrive. This means, among other things, that there was a substantial middle social stratum that had to know how to read and write fairly well. To produce such men required education. A key characteristic of oasis society must have been absence, created in large measure by the caravan traffic to and from the valley. Each round trip must have meant close to four weeks away from home. It is likely that some men were away half of the time, or more. And the letters from Kellis show, moreover, that apart from those involved in the transportation business, many oasites inevitably spent a considerable amount of time in

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the valley on all sorts of other business. The traces of these absences— for example, to go and register documents in Alexandria—can be found as well in the archive of the nekrotaphoi, the funerary workers of Kysis, which I have assembled and hope to publish before long. Long absences were part of the price to be paid for the economic advantages I have enumerated. And many families had relatives living in the valley, whom they no doubt visited from time to time. We know little about the consequences for oasis society resulting from this structural situation. Although we move very much into the realm of speculation here, it seems worth adducing the presence in the nekrotaphoi archive from Kysis, in the south of the Kharga Oasis, of several people without patronymics, whose only identification is their mother’s name—individuals who are elsewhere often referred to by scholars as apatores (“fatherless”), although that term never occurs in the Kysis dossier.33 Apart from one man who as a slave could not have had a legal father, there are at least five instances of non-paternal identification among the identifiable members of the nekrotaphic families. These stand against twenty-six individuals with patronymics and twelve for whom the parentage is not preserved. The fatherless thus come to 16.1 percent of those whose parentage is attested. By contrast, Herbert Youtie estimated from the Karanis money-tax registers compiled by the collector Sokrates in the second century that the percentage of apatores there was in the range of 2.1–2.6 percent. Some self-consciousness of fatherless status is shown in the nekrotaphic archive, despite the absence of the term apator, by the fact that in every case except that of a woman appearing as a grandmother, the word huios (son) or thugater (daughter) is added before the mother’s name, where otherwise a father’s name would be given without any relational word; by contrast, metros (“of mother”) is used only where a patronymic is also given. This last point is also true of the ostraka from Douch, where the five volumes published to date do yield a number of people with mothers’ names but no patronymics; any attempt at quantification there is handicapped by the fact that the ostraka come from a military milieu, where ranks and titles are often given instead of patronymics. A count of the names in the Dakhla documentation, as collected by Klaas Worp in his repertory of names from the oases, and including the first volume 33. This archive is only partly published to date; I am preparing a complete edition and reedition. About apatores, it should be noted that Herbert Youtie pointed out in his celebrated article on the subject (Youtie 1976) that this word becomes scarcer as the third century goes on, then disappears after 314, by coincidence the end-date of this archive.

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of the Trimithis ostraka, yields about 4.64 percent of mothers’ names; Trimithis alone gives 5.3 percent, but this difference is probably not significant. A figure around 5 percent seems an upper limit, and the percentages in the second volume of Trimithis ostraka are lower. The numbers thus seem higher than those of the earlier Karanis registers, but much lower than in the fairly small sample of the nekrotaphoi. Interpreting this information, even apart from legitimate questions about the statistical value of such small numbers, is difficult.34 We may reasonably be reluctant to revert to the kind of view that Youtie rightly characterized as too judgmental, seeing illegitimacy as “a natural consequence of the loose morals of a low-class population.” But given the date and the social milieu, we can exclude the reasons responsible for the kind of illegitimacy Youtie was most interested in, namely the technical lack of a legal father that resulted from Roman restrictions on legitimate marriage between some groups: the fact that soldiers on active service could not marry, and that the Gnomon of the Idios Logos—an elaborate code regulating legal status—prohibited marriage between some classes of the population. The nekrotaphic archive belongs entirely to the period of universal Roman citizenship after the Antonine Constitution of 212, and after the end of the marriage prohibition for soldiers, under Septimius Severus (ruled 193–211)—hence the termination of the two regulations that Youtie cited as artificial generators of legal illegitimacy. Absence may not be the only aspect of oasis society to come into play, however. Illegitimacy in late antique Egypt, when none of the legal requirements limiting intermarriage any longer applied, is probably in large part the result of concubinage, enduring sexual relationships not formalized as marriage. There are reasons to think that concubinage is in essence a product of social inequality, of power in the hands of some men to enter into such relationships even with women of free-citizen birth, on the strength of economic disparities between the parties. Given the economic stratification that seems likely to have existed in oasis society, it is perhaps not surprising that the better-off, mostly the managerial class, would have been able to use that power to enter into unequal unions, perhaps with women from the tenantry. The men who are identified by their mother’s name in the Trimithis ostraka are, as far as we can see, members of that rent-paying class. This may be no coincidence. It seems likely that the inequality of oasis society permeated every aspect of personal relationships. 34. For what follows, see in more detail Bagnall forthcoming.

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7 Trimithis in the Culture of the Eastern Roman Empire 7.1. Literary culture and education in the Dakhla Oasis Raffaella Cribiore

The texts on ostraka found in the oasis include school exercises together with other categories of writing, such as labels, accounts, and short letters. These diverse texts have one thing in common: their brevity, which allowed them to be contained in their entirety on the small surface available. Ostraka were ideal for use in primary education to display, as here, alphabets and lists written in coarse hands;1 they could circulate in class with minimal risk of damage. Papyrus, however, is so far missing at Amheida because of the humidity, so at first it looked as if our knowledge of the lives and activities of pepaideumenoi—cultivated persons—would remain severely limited. Was the Dakhla Oasis so far from the Nile valley as to prevent its inhabitants from making contact with higherlevel education, or had we simply not yet been able to find any trace of it? That the latter was the case, as finds at Kellis would encourage us to think, became evident with the excavation of the house of Serenos and the discovery of the school annexed to it. 1. Cf. Bagnall and Ruffini 2012: 198–9. Instruction at this level might also address female students. Secondary education at the hands of the grammarian and the rhetor, however, served only males. For this reason, in what follows the pronouns are all masculine.

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The house itself illustrated how people came into contact with culture, displaying, for instance, mythological learning both in painted plaster (see §7.2) and in writing. As we look at the evidence, it is important to bear in mind the general goals of education here. Was it simply transmitting knowledge and specific skills, or was it communicating a specific attitude and point of view? Were fathers in the oasis striving to procure teachers from afar because they believed that knowledge would provide their sons with a practical guide for navigating the outside world? Or did they mainly want their children to improve their chances of achieving material success by possessing some coveted tokens of culture that would allow them to compete with others in the oasis and with the people in the valley? In 2006 we started what turned out to be a two-year-long excavation of a building next to the house of Serenos. When it became evident that it housed a fourth-century school containing several rooms, the whole expedition was thrilled, and for many reasons. The mere uncovering of a school building would have been an important event. Most teachers in antiquity did not use premises exclusively devoted to teaching, so that identifying such spaces is almost impossible. They taught in private rooms that belonged either to them or to the patrons who offered them hospitality, or they made use of such locations as temples and abandoned tombs.2 Being able to identify premises where teaching and learning occurred is thus highly unusual. The literary sources often mention the advantages of studying and learning, but rarely describe the students’ accommodation. The Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana, which were schoolbooks supposedly composed around the fourth century— whether in the east or the west is not known—contain vignettes of the routine of going to school in the morning.3 They mention a staircase leading to a school building and a large room with benches serving the needs of pupils of different educational levels. We have known that specifically purposed schools like this one existed, but identifying them, even where we know they did, has generally proven impossible. In fourth-century Antioch, the sophist Libanius ran a famous school of rhetoric. At the start of his career he made use of various private rooms; later, on becoming the official sophist of the city, he was given access to a large room in the city hall.4 Earthquakes, unfortunately, have effaced any trace of this school. 2. Cribiore 2001: 25–34. 3. Dickey 2012. 4. Libanius (Or. 22.31 and 5.45–52); Cribiore 2007b: 43–7 esp. 44.

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Figure 119. Classrooms at Kom el-Dikka, Alexandria.

Auditoria for the teaching of law existed in Berytus (modern Beirut), according to a work referred to as Expositio totius mundi et gentium. Those lecture halls have not survived, and it is uncertain whether they existed as separate structures or were situated in buildings devoted to other purposes.5 The school found in Amheida can be compared in certain respects with the auditoria found in Kom el-Dikka, Alexandria.6 These halls were more numerous, possessed benches for students and sometimes seats 5. See Hall 2004: 66–7. The Theodosian Code also has rulings about auditoria in Constantinople that are not extant. 6. Derda et al. 2007.

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Figure 120. A wall showing a poetic dipinto in a schoolroom (Room 15) at Amheida.

for teachers (thronoi) (Fig. 119). What has been called “the university of Alexandria” occupied a vast space and included an amphitheater for delivering orations. It is thought to have offered a whole course in higher education, along with grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, and even medicine. No writing was left on the walls of these teaching halls, and no papyrus referring unquestionably to them has been preserved from the site,7 so we can extrapolate the activities of students and teachers only from the literary sources. From Zacharias, bishop of Mytilene, we learn that later in the fifth century the grammarian Horapollon and the sophists and philosophers who taught liberal studies in the city received students in their homes on certain days of the week and at the school on others. In the Life of Severus, he says that on Fridays Horapollon and the philosophers taught in school, but the other professors taught at home.8 The Amheida and Kom el-Dikka schools are also similar in so far as they were located in premises exclusively used for teaching, both came to light through archaeological excavations, and both are still partially extant. The Amheida school, naturally on a less grand scale, could offer only grammar (and perhaps some rhetoric), and to a limited number 7. The soil was too damp for the preservation of papyri. 8. M. A. Kugener, ed., Zacharias Scholasticus, Vita Severi, Patrologia Orientalis II fasc. 1, Paris 1903: 23.

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of students. Yet this school is unique because it presents poetic texts extraordinarily vividly and accurately. The writing in red ink that covers the walls of Room 15 displays poetry previously unknown (Fig. 120); and we can try to reconstruct what appear to be several days of school activities frozen in time, giving us a window onto ancient education in progress. School exercises such as these, found all over Graeco-Roman Egypt and written on several materials (mainly papyri, ostraka, and wooden tablets),9 all seem to have the same quality of immediacy, but they have usually been separated from their context and thus exist in a vacuum. The house of Serenos was built around 330–340, and the school structure (B5) next door belongs to the same period. The building functioned for a short time as a school, until some years later Serenos extended his house to the north by incorporating it and transforming its space into storage rooms. The school consists, as now identifiable, of three rooms, 15, 19, and 23, but it may be that there were originally more. Low benches were built along the walls of each room. In Room 15 they stood in front of the large dipinto that filled the wall with the elegiac distichs inscribed there (Fig. 121).10 Sitting on the benches, students could study and memorize the text, or they could stand on them to write on the plastered wall. In Room 19 the benches were higher and, judging from the remains of letters on the walls, the students here too probably stood on them to reach the writing surface. The close proximity of house and school gives rise to an obvious question. Did Serenos’ sons attend the school? Together with their mother and father, they appear in a painted panel in the dining room (Room 1). They are sitting formally, at a banquet, dressed in the Greek style, and they have the solemn, elegant look of the young men sometimes portrayed in Egyptian mummy portraits. It is likely, though impossible to prove, that these two youths will have taken advantage of the proximity of the school to their home. Here they will have attempted to construct for themselves an image of perfect Greekness. Because its doorway is remarkably large, Room 15 appears to have served an important function in the school. Perhaps it was the school’s main focus, housing students of the highest level. The west wall was plastered and inscribed, but now only isolated letters remain. The east wall was also plastered and, judging from the presence of a few letters 9. Cribiore 1996. 10. Cribiore, Davoli, and Ratzan 2008.

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Figure 121. Benches in Room 15.

Figure 122. Room 15, view from above.

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that can be seen underneath the dipinto, had contained a previous text (Fig. 122). In effect, the walls functioned as whiteboards that could be erased and written on again: this is the only instance found in Egypt of walls used in this way in an educational setting. (Actual whitened boards, covered in gesso, were in use in Egypt from Pharaonic times and well known in the Roman period.) Not that this is very different from the way other materials functioned. For instance, students who wanted to reuse a papyrus usually inscribed their new text on the back of it and only very rarely sponged off the old one. (Dots on top of some letters to be corrected, indicating deletion, do not appear on school exercises but only in scholarly texts.) Generally, when students needed to rub letters out they applied the eternal wet finger. What we find at Amheida calls to mind the erasing of an old text and the writing of a new one on a wax tablet. The text on a tablet could be obliterated just by smoothing out the wax with the back of the stylus, then writing anew. Wooden tablets were covered with a whitish coating that permitted the writer to wash off any unwanted text. The surface was then reusable, again employing pen and ink. Such tablets are the closest models for the use of walls as writing surfaces. On papyrus and other materials, writers mainly used a black ink made of carbon and gum arabic; later, brown ink was popular. Red ink was used infrequently and mostly for headings, but here it makes the text stand out on the white background. The text of the dipinto in Room 15 consists of five columns of elegiac couplets plus some sporadic hexameters. In all there appear to be at least eight epigrams, dedicated by a teacher to his students. The palaeographic style is competent and recalls that of some contemporary literary papyri and inscriptions. The first two columns are reasonably well preserved, but the surface of the rest is badly abraded or erased, and so full of holes that only isolated words and letters are discernible. Though it is conceivable that the condition of the wall was not ideal at the time of inscribing, most of the damage must have occurred when Serenos annexed this room and converted it into a storage magazine. A rare feature of the text worth pointing out is the presence of frequent lectional signs, such as breathings, accents, and apostrophes (Fig. 123). These signs, extremely rare in early papyri, anticipate what has been called the “grammar of legibility” of medieval texts. The dipinto was thus a didactic model for the students to assimilate.

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Figure 123. Detail of the dipinto with lectional signs.

A continuous translation is possible only for the first two columns— for the rest, observations on individual words have to suffice. [Col. 1] “. . . here [I withdraw] near the sources of the sacred leaves. But may god grant my wishes that [you all] learn the Muses’ honeyed works, with all the Graces and with Hermes son of Maia reaching the full summit of rhetorical knowledge. Be bold, my boys: the great god will grant you to have a beautiful crown of manifold virtue.” [Col. 2] “. . . yearning after your mother . . . To my students: My talented boys, from the spring of the Pierian waters drink till you are sated [or till the end]. To the same: Work hard for me, toils make men manly . . .”

The first, mutilated, line of column 1 probably does not allude to anywhere in Egypt but defines an ideal place, a locus amoenus. Various deities then appear, to populate this mythological landscape. A man who seems to be a teacher addresses the young men under his tutelage. He wants them to be able to ascend the hill of education and, with the help of

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the Graces and of Hermes, reach its summit. In the rest of the dipinto he exhorts them to follow the example of Herakles, immersing themselves in their toil. The image of education as a steep hill that students have to climb occurs in many educational contexts. In the Professor of Rhetoric by the satirist Lucian, for instance, the students reach the top of the hill of learning by various paths, more or less arduous; and rhetoric, represented as a lady that they wish to “marry”, is waiting for them there. The young men of Trimithis must have been been familiar with the Muses, the Graces, Hermes, Herakles, and other classical deities, encountering them in the poetic texts studied at the secondary level of education with a grammarian. By calling these young men paides—boys, or sons—and addressing them in an educational setting, this man identifies himself as a teacher and alludes to mutual feelings of affection that distinguish the teacher–student relationship. In the fourth century the teacher-father and student-son model became popular, as the orations of the rhetors Himerius (an Athenian sophist) and Libanius and the philosopher Themistius show. In column 2, the students are clearly identified with the word scholastikoi, “pupils.” In the first epigram, the mention of “god” and “the great god” is intriguing but ambiguous. Did the verses allude to a mythological god or to the Christian God? Both are possible. The language of these epigrams is heavily poetic and epic, but many expressions from Homer and Apollonius Rhodius later passed into Christian poetry and prose. Hermes Trismegistos, or Thoth, was not only the god of rhetoric but also the main deity of Trimithis, and the epithet megas (great) is attested for him, so that the identification appears at first possible. And yet Christian epigrammatists often applied the same epithet to the Christian God. In the first epigram, moreover, Hermes is mentioned among the deities who escort the students up the hill, so he cannot be identified with the “god” that the teacher invokes at the beginning, and it seems very likely that the “god” is the Christian God. The coexistence of mythological gods and God poses no difficulty, because in the fourth century Christians claimed for themselves the right to use a classicizing language and literature; this contest for the classical heritage lies behind the emperor Julian’s edict against Christian teachers and the counterreaction of Gregory of Nazianzus, among others. The plastered walls of Room 19 (Fig. 124) were inscribed with several texts, no doubt many more than the two that are preserved. These two texts, on the west wall, are clearly visible and written side by side. The

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Figure 124. Homeric passage on a wall in Room 19.

one on the left contains three lines (4.221–3) from the Odyssey that were extensively quoted and commented upon in antiquity, followed by a brief comment. They are written in minute and fluent characters, the kind used in documents, which are very different from those usually employed to transcribe literary works. Book 4 of the Odyssey contains many references to Egypt, and passages from it are often found in the papyri. The lines refer to Telemachus’ visit to Sparta where Helen mixed for her weary guests “[a drug] that takes away grief and anger, and brings forgetfulness of every ill. Whoever should drink this down when it is mixed in the bowl would not let fall a tear down his cheek, in the course of that day at least. Imitate.” Ancient writers attempted to identify the healing drug in question, and some, like Plutarch, thought that it consisted of words and alluded specifically to the tale of Odysseus’ adventures that followed. Interestingly, Himerius in Oration 16 linked the drug with an educational context. The Homeric words together with Himerius’ own had the power to quell the students’ anger. It is not easy to identify with certainty the reason why a teacher should have written the lines in such a tiny hand, adding the request to “imitate”. Since the passage contains several rare words, it is conceivable that he chose it so as to give the students practice in glossing.

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Figure 125. A passage about an ignorant king from Room 19.

To the right of and above the Homeric text are lines in larger characters that are unfortunately quite abraded (Fig. 125). This hand is different from the previous one and may vaguely resemble a book hand, if not a very proficient one. Or perhaps the writer was a student. The loss of a large central part of the wall’s plaster prevents us from fully understanding the text. The main content, however, can be partly reconstructed from Plutarch’s Regum et imperatorum apophthegmata (174E–F) and from his De Alexandri Magni fortuna aut virtute (334B), where the story is more developed. Plutarch recounts: “Anteas king of the Scythians, who had captured the flute player Ismenias, ordered him to play the flute over the wine. While everyone else marveled and applauded, he swore that hearing his horse neigh was more pleasant: for so long he had kept his ears away from the Muses. His soul was in the stables and was more accustomed to hear not even horses but asses.” Plutarch appended a moral ending to this anecdote, saying that kings in their ignorance could not hear the Muses; they promoted neither the arts nor music and generally oppressed artists. There is no doubt that these very mutilated lines refer to the tale reported by Plutarch: his text, too, deals with a military expedition and a banquet where people drink wine while listening to a flute player; and

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toward the end the name of King Anteas appears. But the lines on the wall are not a quotation from Plutarch. Several versions of the story of Anteas may have been circulating, but it is also conceivable that those words might be a reworking by a student asked to paraphrase the story. Material of this kind was used in teaching at all levels. One of the first progymnasmata—preliminary rhetorical exercises—consisted of commenting on anecdotes that might or might not contain an ethical statement. This exercise, especially when not developed at length, belonged to the province of the grammarian, who would have been the students’ first teacher of Homer and the other poets, as well as grammar. Thus the texts written in Room 19 could have originated in a grammarian’s class. Grammarians were formidable personages who resided in cities and towns. They commanded respect, enjoyed a high social status, and were wealthy. In Alexandria, Palladas, who taught the most privileged children, complained that they tried to avoid paying their tuition fees and cursed his profession.11 As a rule, though, grammarians held well respected positions. But do we have to assume that an individual designated as grammatikos was active in this school? Strictly speaking, no. Other teachers, called didaskaloi or kathegetai, who travelled through the country offering their services, could deliver the same traditional teaching, as the papyri show.12 The verses written in Room 15 present another quandary. They refer to rhetorical training, but it is impossible to verify at which level. Are they alluding to rhetoric proper—that is, the teaching of declamations and orations—or to a mere smattering of that discipline? Centuries before, the Roman Quintilian had complained that a proper division of the various disciplines was no longer observed, in either Roman or Greek schools.13 Thus while the rhetors occupied themselves only with declamations and orations, grammarians, not content with teaching just grammar and the poets, encroached upon rhetoric. Students, therefore, remained with a grammarian for a long time, so that Quintilian commented bitterly that boys passed on to the rhetor when they already knew how to declaim. This is the scenario likely to have been presented by the Trimithis school, where a secondary-level teacher would have taught the poets while expounding a bit on rhetoric. It is true that students continued to read poetry in rhetorical schools, but the heavy 11. Kaster 1988: 327–9. For a new papyrus with epigrams of Palladas, see Wilkinson 2012. 12. Cribiore 2001: 53. 13. Quintilian, Inst.or. 2.1.

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use of lectional signs in the dipinto to teach proper reading and writing, together with the impeccable verses, point to a grammarian’s class that was offering young men an education befitting the oasite cultural elite. The high quality of the mythological paintings in the house of Serenos described in the next section testifies to the cultural level of his household. It also provides a window onto the cultivated tastes of the visitors who came to ask for Serenos’ assistance and to enjoy the entertainment he provided. In this respect, another room, number 13, offers a further surprise. This one was painted in purple with a decoration of palm trees and garlands. It originally possessed panels depicting figures of which only their mythological names, such as Dionysos, Polydeukes, and Hephaistos, remain. Originally there had been more writing, but it was destroyed when the room was converted for other uses, or when the walls deteriorated. One wonders about the function of a room like this, next to the vestibule of the main entrance to the house. Was it a room for rest at night or for repose after a banquet? Did people use it for reading literature, for entertaining cultivated guests, or for business meetings? Scholars have shown, in fact, that they used such rooms (Latin, cubicula) for several purposes besides resting. Pliny the Younger, for example, used his bedroom to receive friends and recite poetry.14 Although Rome was far from the oasis, some of its inhabitants would have valued social and cultural relations with the metropolis. A line written in chalk on the north wall of Room 13 is a welcome indication that people in the house read, remembered, and quoted from literature (Fig. 126). The line in question comes from Euripides’ tragedy Hypsipyle, which was little known before papyri revealed some essential fragments. In one Oxyrhynchus papyrus (P.Oxy. 6.852) the second column of fragment 60 is missing its right side, and various scholars have speculated on what the missing part of line 86 might have said. This is the verse that someone scribbled on the wall. Thus one of the most ephemeral of writing implements has left a lasting mark that is significant for several reasons. First, the line vindicates the opinion of the great scholar D. L. Page, against that of others. Second, this line— “Adrastus will come to Thebes”—that was written so casually, raises some questions. The papyri show that Hypsipyle was not very popular in Egypt, and was absent from the school curriculum. Who was this individual, then, who nonchalantly quoted a little-known tragedy? Was he a scholar familiar with the whole work, or did he know only this verse? 14. Riggsby 1997.

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Figure 126. A line from Euripides on a wall in House B1, Room 13.

Could he be identified with the teacher who worked at the school? Or had the line become a proverb? We are not familiar with a proverb like this, but if one did exist, its presence on the wall would have a different cultural significance. In conclusion, our findings in Amheida abundantly demonstrate that the culture of the oasites matched that of the most cultivated locations in the Nile valley, and that it mattered to fathers that their sons be exposed to a refined education, or paideia. Financial and other material reasons were only one aspect: paideia was highly esteemed, had a value per se. Even without papyri or letters that could give us more details, the house itself and the school have a voice. It would seem that the students of Trimithis were no different from those two other boys, Hephaistion and Horigenes, who in the same century wrote from Alexandria a finely honed letter to their father, thanking him for the upbringing he had given them. They used refined expressions and an abundance of accents, breathings and other sophistications that their grammarian teacher would have been proud of.15 The sons of Serenos might well have done the same. 15. P.Ryl. 4.624.

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7.2 Amheida’s wall paintings Susanna McFadden

Wall painting is rarely preserved in great quantity in the territory that was once part of the Roman Empire, despite its ubiquity in ancient times. The exception, of course, is the great body of evidence from the Bay of Naples preserved for us by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. Apart from this accident of nature, in most of the preserved examples outside funerary contexts it is only the floor levels of Graeco-Roman spaces that survive. Consequently, our understanding of the complexities of domestic decoration in the ancient world is woefully incomplete. For this reason, the wall paintings of Amheida are a scholarly windfall, in that they offer us a rare glimpse into the visual culture of the late Roman Empire. The town’s mural remains are unique not only for their quantity, but also because the subject matter of much of the plaster thus far recovered is unprecedented in both Egypt and the wider empire. While I shall focus here on the lively mythological and geometric decorations from the house of Serenos, it is worth noting that as of a survey in 2015, traces of painted plaster have been detected in approximately 33 other rooms scattered across the site—and these represent only what is visible from the surface (Fig. 127). There is still a wealth of evidence awaiting discovery beneath the sands. Although the wall paintings in Serenos’ house (B1) were discovered in 1979, the domicile and its decorations were only fully excavated between 2004 and 2007. Four of the twelve rooms in the house contain painted plaster, which, from the accompanying archaeological and documentary data discussed elsewhere in this book, can be firmly attributed to the mid-fourth century. Room 1, where the figural images are concentrated, likely served as the main reception space and hence received the most comprehensive elaboration, consisting of both figural vignettes and dynamic geometric “wallpaper” patterns (Fig. 128). The decorative schemes of the painted plaster found in three other, subsidiary, rooms (11, 13 and 14) comprise colorful geometric designs, some of which bear a strong resemblance to motifs found in the nearby town of Kellis (Figs. 129–130).16 Perhaps half of Room 1’s plaster is still attached in situ, but the collapse of the mud-brick domed ceiling sometime after the house was abandoned in antiquity caused much damage to the rest. Complicating 16. Hope and Whitehouse 2006. http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/ancient-kellis/painted-residence/

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Figure 127. Traces of painted plaster in an unexcavated room at Amheida.

Figure 128. The house of Serenos, Room 1, north wall and northeast corner.

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the plaster’s state of preservation is the fact that it was not of high quality to begin with. Unlike with true fresco (buon fresco), a technique that normally involves the application of several layers of plaster, including the vital arricio layer that acts as an anchor between the walls and the layer that holds the pigment, the intonaco, the paintings in the house of Serenos are executed over only a very thin substratum of straw-tempered mud plaster attached to the mud-brick walls (Fig. 131). While true fresco is rare in Egypt, distillations of the technique are well known, and the thinness of the plaster in B1 is in marked contrast to the thicker, more stable decorative surfaces found, for example, in the houses at Kellis, which are of an earlier date.17 This raises the question of whether the lower quality of the plaster reflects the skill of the artists, the availability of materials in the fourth century, the state of the patron’s economic solvency, or some combination of these. One might expect to find the best materials in B1, a home that presumably belonged to an important city official; but whether B1’s plaster represents the best that was available at the time, or simply parsimony on the part of the patron, may in the future be determined via comparison with other painted houses at Amheida. Interestingly, plaster fragments akin to true fresco, as well as others of varying degrees of quality between true fresco and the plaster from B1, have been detected on site during recent surveys. These may predate the fourth century, as at Kellis, but only further excavation will tell us for sure. In addition to the in situ paintings, many fragments of painted plaster, both large and small, were recovered from the fill of B1 in 2004, but unfortunately it has been difficult to reconstruct the original position on the walls of these pieces. Approximately 135 trays of small pieces, seventy-five large fragments still attached to mud bricks, and four large blocks of plaster attached to pieces of brick masonry are currently in storage and being studied (see Fig. 131). The house has now been buried once again so as to best preserve the in situ paintings, but in 2009 a fullscale replica of the house was constructed on the edge of the modern archaeological site. Painted facsimiles of the paintings from Rooms 11 and 13 were added to the replica during the 2010 field season, the geometric registers (bands) were completed in 2012, the dome in 2013 and the figural motifs in 2014 (Figs. 132–134).18 The explosions of color and pattern that today’s visitor encounters 17. Hope and Whitehouse 2006: 327–8. 18. Schulz 2011; Schulz forthcoming.

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Figure 129. Geometric design from Room 11.

Figure 130. Geometric design from Room 14.

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Figure 131. West wall of Room 1 and doorway into Room 14, illustrating thickness of painted plaster attached to mud-brick masonry.

upon entering the reception room of the replica house provide him or her with an authentic recreation of the original experience—it is what can only be described as a scene to overwhelm the senses. Every surface of the walls and ceiling was painted, so that at first glance the sheer variety of scenes would appear to belie the impression of programmatic unity. A band of decoration reaching from just above floor to eye level, and displaying a variety of geometric designs reminiscent of mosaic and

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Figure 132. Replica of the house of Serenos, showing geometric registers.

Figure 133. The dome in the replica of the house of Serenos.

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Figure 134. The replica house, figural motifs.

textile patterns found throughout the Roman Empire, circles the room.19 Above this register, the compositional format varies: the east and west walls are decorated with two filmstrip-like bands of figural decoration, while on the north and (we presume) the south walls, the figural vignettes are set in half-lunettes. Triangular pendentives at each corner of the room containing haloed putti holding aloft garlands, as well as the psychedelically patterned dome, complete the room’s decorative zones. By far the majority of the painted surfaces display geometric motifs that are somewhat unusual compared with other contemporary wall designs, both local and international (Fig. 135). But the figural decorations are even more surprising for the era, given the preponderance of themes drawn from Graeco-Roman mythology. Preserved in situ in the original house are visual interpretations of narrative scenes well known in Graeco-Roman literature—such as, on the north wall, that of Perseus (carrying the head of Medusa) rescuing Andromeda from a sea monster. Many ancient authors tell this story, in both Greek and Latin.20 Also pictured on this wall is a scene showing the dramatic moment when Odysseus’ old nurse Eurykleia recognizes him upon his return from the 19. Ling 1998; Dunbabin 1999. 20. Detailed in Leahy 1980.

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Figure 135. Detail of geometric designs from Room 1’s northeast corner.

Trojan War, related in Book 19 of Homer’s Odyssey (Fig. 136). We find the visual version of another dramatic moment, this one from Book 8 of the Odyssey, on the east wall, where a procession of Olympian deities witnesses the adultery of Aphrodite and Ares (Fig. 137). Semi-preserved scenes still attached to the east wall depicting figures to the right of the adultery scene in Phrygian caps (which in Greco-Roman art identifies them as non-Greek/Roman and from Anatolia—perhaps Trojans), and above the adultery seated upon thrones, suggest further narrative complexities to the room’s figural program. Myriad additional vignettes rooted in classical literature are also hinted at in the painted fragments recovered from Room 1. Reconstructed from the east wall, for example, are scenes of a satyr chasing a nymph,

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Figure 136. The north wall of Room 1 in 1979, showing Odysseus and Eurykleia (photo Peter Sheldrick).

Figure 137. The east wall, depicting the adultery of Aphrodite and Ares.

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Figure 138. A reconstructed vignette from Room 1, east wall, showing Zeus as a bull and Europa.

Zeus in the guise of an eagle embracing Ganymede, Zeus (as a bull) with Europa, and perhaps Daphne in the process of being transformed into a tree (Fig. 138). Several large pieces of painted plaster that once decorated the west wall have also been recovered, still on their mud-brick backing, showing narrative scenes as yet unidentified. These include a cuirassed soldier and a female figure riding a chariot, and an enthroned male being threatened by a woman with a sword (Fig. 139). In these cases, while we cannot decipher the specific mythological tales being told, we can at least say that the images reference generic tropes in Graeco-Roman art and literature, such as “Triumph” and perhaps “Revenge”, suggesting many layers of encoded meaning, aimed at multiple audiences. What meaning a viewer was able to grasp would depend perhaps on their background and level of education. In general, it is rare in Roman art for visual narratives to reflect an exact textual equivalent, so we may not be able to identify these scenes precisely; nor, for the images to function as intended in antiquity, is that really necessary. Adding to the complexity of Room 1’s figural program are scenes that are more temporal in theme, to do with civic and social identity. The figure of Polis, seated next to a schematic architectural element on

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Figure 139. A fragment from the west wall of Room 1 depicting (left) the haunches of several rearing horses, and (right) a woman brandishing a sword at an enthroned figure.

the far left of the east wall’s lower figural register, is likely a reference to Trimithis’ status as polis, which we know was achieved at the latest by 304 (Fig. 140).21 By extension, this personification also alludes to the house owner’s privileged status within the city’s administration. Serenos may in fact be pictured cattycorner to the depiction of Polis, on the far left of the west wall’s lower figural register, where he and his family appear to be enjoying one of the ancient world’s most important social rituals, the banquet, or convivium (Fig. 141).22 This scene is especially interesting because it is self-referential, illustrating an occasion that may well have taken place within the painted walls of Room 1. As such, it suggests a self-consciousness on Serenos’ part and a desire to promote himself as a member of an elite society, and one steeped in Graeco-Roman paideia, or education, as exemplified also by the mythological subject matter of the paintings. Last but not least, another detached piece of masonry, one with plaster from the west wall depicting Orpheus taming the animals, defies easy characterization (Fig. 142). By the fourth century CE, this subject was widely found across the empire and executed in a variety of media, including mosaic and painting, as well as contexts—domestic, funerary, pagan and Christian. Depending on who is viewing this image, 21. Bagnall and Ruffini 2004. 22. Dunbabin 2003.

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Figure 140. Room 1, east wall, detail of Polis.

Figure 141. Room 1, west wall, banquet scene.

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Figure 142. A large plaster fragment in situ portraying Orpheus taming the animals.

the meaning shifts: in the Christian catacombs of Rome, for example, Orpheus calming the beasts with his music became an allegory for Christ bringing harmony to the world.23 By contrast, in a domestic setting such as Serenos’ house, the scene could simply be another representation of age-old Graeco-Roman literary and artistic tropes. Supporting this notion is the fact that among the plaster fragments from the west wall, a second figure in a Phrygian cap and holding a lyre was also found near Orpheus, as well as a female figure of comparable size, suggesting that the iconic image of Orpheus and the animals might have been part of a more complex narrative scene, not typical of a Christian context. However, in late antique Trimithis, Orpheus might, in fact, have embodied both meanings. We know that there were Christians in the oasis, and indeed in Serenos’ immediate circle, by the time these paintings were executed, so a polysemic motif such as the one depicted here could have been aimed at multiple audiences, both pagan and Christian. Collectively, the paintings from B1 are representative of a longstanding Roman tradition of communicating issues of identity and status in the domestic arena via carefully considered image programs, particularly those decorating the most important room of the house, the one in which business and ceremonial events took place.24 In late antiquity, 23. For an example of Orpheus in the Roman catacombs see Deckers 1987: 348–50. On Orpheus in late antique art see Murray 1981: 37–63, and Jensen 2000: 41–2. 24. Clarke 1991; Ellis 1991; Bergmann 1994; Boozer 2010.

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which saw the preservation of Graeco-Roman education among the empire’s elites—in spite of, in lieu of, or perhaps even alongside the new social strictures driven by Christianity—figural narratives in particular, referencing Graeco-Roman mythology, link the house’s owner with wider cultural developments. But despite this continuity with empire-wide elite practices, the style and iconography of the paintings from the house of Serenos, and the decorative system employed in Room 1, are eclectic, not really conforming to known contemporary, or indeed earlier, domestic formulae, in either Egypt or the wider empire.25 The composition of Room 1’s walls and ceiling can be characterized as generally asymmetrical, especially given the inconsistent size and shape of the figural vignettes distributed around the perimeter in two, perhaps three, registers. By comparison, late Roman painted domestic spaces from around the Mediterranean are much more conservative, favoring instead linear decorative systems that divide wall surfaces into flattened, geometric sectors or illustrate large expanses of imitation marble paneling or opus sectile designs, fictive pilasters or even simplified architectural settings framing floating figures both large and small. For example, substantial bodies of late Roman wall paintings dating from the second to fourth centuries CE survive from both the western and eastern parts of the empire (such as Rome and Ostia in Italy, and Zeugma and Ephesos in Turkey), but these bear little resemblance in format or iconography to the program of decoration in the House of Serenos.26 Interestingly, the filmstrip-like format of the figural registers in Room 1 does bear some resemblance to Egyptian-style mortuary decorative schemes, in which narrative vignettes related to funerary texts are arrayed in bands around the inside of a tomb. This format is employed at the necropolis of El-Muzawwaqa near Trimithis, in the tomb of Petosiris, for example (Fig. 143).27 While the date of this tomb (probably late first or early second century CE), its painting’s narrative content, and the function of the space, are not directly comparable to the paintings from the house of Serenos, the similarities in composition 25. For a survey of extant wall painting in Roman Egypt, see Whitehouse 2010: 1022–8. 26. On late antique wall paintings generally, see Dorigo 1971 and Joyce 1991. Site-specific studies include Zeugma: Barbet 2005; Ephesos: Zimmermann and Ladstätter 2010; Rome: Mielsch 1978; Brenk 1995. See Zimmerman 2014 for the most recent discoveries and discussions related to wall painting in the late Roman Empire. 27. Thanks to Paola Davoli for this suggestion. For the painted tombs of El-Muzawwaqa see Osing 1982 and Whitehouse 1998.

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Figure 143. The tomb of Petosiris at El-Muzawwaqa.

might indicate some Egyptian influence in the house’s decorations, whose style and iconography are otherwise entirely Graeco-Roman. A winged reclining nude figure on the northwest wall, just below the scene of Perseus and Andromeda, may represent Harpokrates, making him the only figure in the decorations identified thus far that can be characterized as “Egyptian.” The tomb of Petosiris is also well known because some of its painted figures are drawn according to classical conventions for depicting the human form, which at first sight might invite further comparison with the decorations from Serenos’ house. However, in the tomb of Petosiris, the classically styled figures are juxtaposed with images rendered according to ancient Egyptian rules for depicting the human body. More specifically, a Graeco-Roman visual vocabulary is used for static vignettes depicting the deceased, which can be read as an expression of social identity. By contrast, Egyptian stylistic conventions employed in the tomb govern the figural scenes depicting Egyptian religious activities.28 This mingling of visual vocabularies illustrates the complex cultural milieu of Roman Egypt, and is a decorative device found in painted tombs throughout 28. Whitehouse 1998: 253.

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the country.29 Such formal variation is not, however, to be found in the house of Serenos. Indeed, the figures from this house are rendered according to artistic conventions that aim to depict bodies naturalistically. While the artist has not been altogether successful in this—the technique is idiosyncratic, concerned more with the vigorous, expressive application of the paint than with producing symmetrical and proportional figures—the style of the figures is nonetheless clearly derived from Graeco-Roman traditions rather than Egyptian. For instance, the pigments are layered and modeled to create the illusion of corporeality and three-dimensional space. Furthermore, the figures have lively facial expressions and gestures, and their poses convey dynamic movement rather than controlled action or static majesty, like the stylized paintings of Isis, Harpokrates and Heron found in a house at Karanis in the Fayyum, one of the few other surviving examples of fourth-century figural painting from a domestic setting in Egypt (Fig. 144).30 Unlike the paintings from Amheida, however, these Karanis deities were not narrative scenes but placed in a niche so as to serve as devotional images. Their style and distinctive function thus make direct comparison with the paintings from Serenos’ house difficult, despite their similar date and context.31 Iconographical antecedents and comparisons for the house of Serenos, both in Egypt and internationally, are also difficult to pinpoint. Locally, some of the geometric motifs, especially the intersecting-circles design to be seen in the secondary Rooms 11 and 14, resemble paintings from several rooms in House B/3/1 in Kellis. This may suggest that instead of importing artisans from more cosmopolitan urban centers, the oasis had its own workshop of painters trained especially in tessellating patterns. It should be noted, however, that the Kellis paintings are dated 29. For a general study of the funerary arts, see Riggs 2005. On the painted tombs of Alexandria, see Venit 2002. 30. It is worth noting, however, that the date of these images from Room E of House B50 is far from certain, and largely based on stylistic comparison with contemporary Christian images. Boak and Peterson 1931: 34, pl. 25, fig. 49; Kelsey Museum Archives (University of Michigan) 5.2159. It has also been suggested that the figure on horseback is not Heron but one of the Dioscuri: Rondot 2013: 60. Rondot further discusses additional paintings of deities from house C65 at Karanis as well as from other domestic contexts in the Fayum such as Theadelphia, which may be closer in style to Amheida’s figural imagery, but these too are not securely dateable, Rondot 2013: 59-65. 31. Slightly earlier (second- or third-century) painted deities (such as Sarapis, Helios and Harpokrates) decorate a niche in House H10 at Marina el-Alamein and are closer in style to Amheida’s paintings; see Kiss 2006. Like the Karanis images, though, these too are iconic and devotional in function and so not directly parallel to Amheida’s narrative scenes.

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Figure 144. Archival photograph of Karanis Excavations, House B50, Heron on left, Isis nursing Harpocrates, KM 5.2159. Photo courtesy Kelsey Museum, University of Michigan.

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two centuries earlier, to the second century CE, so more evidence is needed before we can firmly identify an “oasis style.” Many of the other geometric patterns uncovered at Trimithis and Kellis are commonly found, in Late Antiquity as well as throughout the Roman period, and not just limited to the local. One comes across similar patterns especially in mosaics, as well as textiles all over the empire after the second century, but not, curiously enough, in domestic murals.32 More often than not, the geometric and architectonic motifs painted on Roman-era walls in Egypt33 and elsewhere in the empire mimic the natural veining of expensive marbles or imaginary architectural elements, rather than the intricate designs of tesserae or textiles. In this respect, the murals of Amheida seem to be in the vanguard. From the fourth century onwards in Egypt, textile and mosaic patterns become more popular in wall painting, especially in Christian contexts. We find, for instance, an echo of Room 1’s dome pattern of overlapping “feathers” in a fifth-century tomb chapel in the necropolis at Bagawat.34 Overall, the overwhelming variety of pattern and color on display in the house of Serenos prefigures the “jeweled style” of the early Byzantine era, exemplified by the newly cleaned sixth-century paintings of the Red Monastery Church in Sohag.35 As for the figural scenes in the wider context of late Roman art, just as with the geometric designs there are at present no contemporary domestic parallels. Extant painted walls of the late third or the fourth century in other parts of the empire do not exhibit Amheida’s abundance of Graeco-Roman mythological iconography. In Egypt especially, scenes of this kind, executed in paint, are rare.36 A few plaster fragments depicting classical figures identified as Odysseus and perhaps Penelope, supposedly excavated from a house in Alexandria, seem to come closest in terms of date.37 An earlier painted tomb depicting the myths of 32. Compare for example the decorations of a late antique house from Antandros in the Troad where the mosaics resemble room 1’s painted “carpet” motifs while the house’s wall paintings are decidedly dissimilar, Polat 2014, figs. 2 and 6. One exception to this is the patterns employed in the late-second-century mural paintings from the house underneath the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome; Mols and Moormann 2010: figs. 13 and 14. 33. Early Roman examples include Kom el-Dikka: Majcherek 2002: 41–3, fig. 8; Fayyum: Bresciani 1976: 25–8, pl. A; Kellis: Hope and Whitehouse 2006: 319–20, col. pls. 1 and 2. 34. Chapel 25: Fakhry 1951: 79–88, pls. VI and VII, XXVIIa. For Bagawat in general, see Cipriano 2008, and for the figural images in the “Chapel of the Exodus,” Davis 2001: 150–72. 35. On the “jeweled-style” see Roberts 1989. For the Red Monastery, see Bolman 2006; Bolman forthcoming. 36. Whitehouse 2010. 37. Hanfmann 1992.

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Electra and Oedipus, from Hermopolis Magna, presents us with another interesting parallel,38 though one must be wary of drawing too many conclusions about domestic decoration from funerary contexts because the functions of the spaces are not comparable. In the corpus of wall paintings from the late Roman Empire, it is more usual to see figures such as muses and personifications represented in non-narrative scenes, and rarely are the literary associations as overt as at Trimithis.39 Furthermore, the kind of narrative variety that we see in the paintings of the house of Serenos is unprecedented in any medium. In Late Antiquity, Graeco-Roman mythological themes survive in abundance in mosaics across the Mediterranean, but mosaic narrative scenes are usually isolated visually, within the center of a floor for example, and are rarely collated into as complex a thematic constellation as the one that is emerging at Amheida.40 Characters and motifs derived from Graeco-Roman myth also continue to be pictured in the Egyptian textile corpus after the fourth century, and many extant examples, like Amheida’s paintings, can be described as classical in style.41 For the most part, however, mythological-themed textiles, like mosaics, from the fourth through the seventh centuries allude to classical myth only generally, without the textual specificity or the narrative complexity that we detect in the house of Serenos. One notable exception is an extraordinary painted linen tapestry from the early fifth century which is decorated with three bands of continuous narrative and which might have once adorned a tomb or a Christian cult space.42 In this case, the literary source is the Old Testament, but the filmstrip-like action as well as the classically rendered figures recall Room 1’s figural registers. In summary, the visual culture of late Roman Egypt is difficult to characterize in general, because of the dearth of surviving evidence and also because of the province’s complex population mix. Beginning with the conquest of Egypt by Alexander and the succeeding Macedonian monarchy of the Ptolemies, with its non-indigenous ruling class 38. Gabra and Drioton 1954: 10–11, pls. 14–16. For an overview of the site, Lembke 2010. 39. For example, paintings illustrating Penelope and Deidamia from Zeugma: Barbet 2005, and Perseus and Andromeda from Rome: Mielsch 1976. 40. Examples surveyed in Ling 1998 and Dunbabin 1999. For post-fourth-century instances of mythological subject matter in mosaics, see Bowersock 2006. 41. Such as the famous fourth-century Dionysiac tapestry now in Riggisberg: see Flury-Lemberg, Willers, and Gruber 1987. 42. Kötzsche, Flury-Lemberg and Schiessl 2004, although note that ongoing investigations into this textile are beginning to suggest a much earlier date.

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entrenched in Alexandria—an opulent city constructed de novo in the style of other Hellenistic Mediterranean capitals—two very different modes of visual representation became equally powerful, the Egyptian and the classical. And from the fourth century onwards we have to add to this mix the iconographic vocabulary of Christianity. Throughout the Graeco-Roman period and into late antiquity, artists and patrons alike found many opportunities to employ these styles and their iconographies—and one can speculate, from the choices they made, about their status, identity, beliefs and aspirations. Artists would sometimes use the different styles side by side in the same work, sometimes combine them to create new genres. Where does Trimithis fit into all this? In the context of late antique visual culture, the paintings from Amheida can be described as both unusual and typical, and their discovery complicates quite wonderfully the already tricky task of categorizing the arts of Graeco-Roman Egypt vis-à-vis those of the rest of the empire.

7.3. The evidence of Greek names Roger S. Bagnall

The presence of classical culture in the Dakhla Oasis was not limited to the house of Serenos or even to Trimithis, but widespread. And it manifests itself not only in the school, in literary quotations, and in art, but also in a phenomenon barely detectable in the face of the mass of Egyptian theophoric names (§4.3). Indeed, this is something that might easily escape attention, but in reading documents I have repeatedly been brought up short by a totally unexpected name in the midst of the banal. Now Greek names are not in themselves uncommon in the papyri and inscriptions from Egypt; and Kysis, ‘Ain Waqfa, Kellis, and Trimithis, which make up most of our documentary material from the oases, are no different from most places in the Nile valley or the Fayyum in this respect. The phenomenon in question here is limited to masculine names, a point to which we shall return. Guy Wagner alluded to it briefly in his great work on the oases, mentioning the presence of a number of “classical” Greek names. In this group, however, he combined names that are commonplace in Roman Egypt, like Polydeukes, Leonides, Agathos Daimon (not very classical, that—it is a transparent calque of the name of the Egyptian god Shai), Timotheos, Agathon, and Eros, with

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entrenched in Alexandria—an opulent city constructed de novo in the style of other Hellenistic Mediterranean capitals—two very different modes of visual representation became equally powerful, the Egyptian and the classical. And from the fourth century onwards we have to add to this mix the iconographic vocabulary of Christianity. Throughout the Graeco-Roman period and into late antiquity, artists and patrons alike found many opportunities to employ these styles and their iconographies—and one can speculate, from the choices they made, about their status, identity, beliefs and aspirations. Artists would sometimes use the different styles side by side in the same work, sometimes combine them to create new genres. Where does Trimithis fit into all this? In the context of late antique visual culture, the paintings from Amheida can be described as both unusual and typical, and their discovery complicates quite wonderfully the already tricky task of categorizing the arts of Graeco-Roman Egypt vis-à-vis those of the rest of the empire.

7.3. The evidence of Greek names Roger S. Bagnall

The presence of classical culture in the Dakhla Oasis was not limited to the house of Serenos or even to Trimithis, but widespread. And it manifests itself not only in the school, in literary quotations, and in art, but also in a phenomenon barely detectable in the face of the mass of Egyptian theophoric names (§4.3). Indeed, this is something that might easily escape attention, but in reading documents I have repeatedly been brought up short by a totally unexpected name in the midst of the banal. Now Greek names are not in themselves uncommon in the papyri and inscriptions from Egypt; and Kysis, ‘Ain Waqfa, Kellis, and Trimithis, which make up most of our documentary material from the oases, are no different from most places in the Nile valley or the Fayyum in this respect. The phenomenon in question here is limited to masculine names, a point to which we shall return. Guy Wagner alluded to it briefly in his great work on the oases, mentioning the presence of a number of “classical” Greek names. In this group, however, he combined names that are commonplace in Roman Egypt, like Polydeukes, Leonides, Agathos Daimon (not very classical, that—it is a transparent calque of the name of the Egyptian god Shai), Timotheos, Agathon, and Eros, with

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a number that are unique or rare there. It is this latter group that interests us and prompts some broader reflections on Greek culture in the oases and more generally in Egypt. First, there is a small Homeric cluster. Since Achilleus is common in the papyri, the few examples in the Kellis ostraka are not very consequential. More striking is his father Peleus, a name that appears in a graffito in the Gebel Teir, the range north of Kharga where stone was cut for local use; of this name there is not a single example elsewhere in the papyri. Odysseus is lacking so far (it is extremely rare in the papyri), but the names of both his father Laertes and his son Telemachos appear in ostraka from Kysis (modern Douch). Telemachos is known from a couple of Ptolemaic papyri, and then two people in an Oxyrhynchos papyrus of the mid-third century CE; Laertes otherwise appears in first-century Philadelphia in the Fayyum, but nowhere else. Aeneas, extremely rare in the Roman period, figures in the Kellis ostraka. Eumelos—perhaps alluding to the son of Admetos and Alkestis—turns up in the form of a signature in one ostrakon from our excavations at Trimithis, but this name is not as rare as the others, even though the evidence is heavily Ptolemaic. We may also include here Alektor, again from a Douch ostrakon, who, as the son of Pelops, might seem a relatively obscure allusion. Although cocks are occasionally mentioned in papyrus accounts, the name (“Rooster”) has not shown up before in the papyri. Alas, a Tisamenos that Wagner claims to find in one of the papyri of the nekrotaphoi of Kysis is a ghost, invented by the philologist Wilhelm Crönert in a faulty emendation. But Hylas, Herakles’ companion on the Argo, a name otherwise unknown in papyri and inscriptions, appears in a Kellis ostrakon. With the archaic period, things pick up. The sage Kleoboulos is represented by a curator civitatis of that name in a Kellis papyrus, by an oasis councillor in a couple of papyri from the 370s, and in a host of ostraka from Douch and ‘Ain Waqfa. There is only a single other attestation of the name in the papyri—and that, fossilized in a toponym, so probably referring to a settler of the Hellenistic period. Empedocles, a name found in the papyri only in two Ptolemaic texts, is probably preserved in a graffito from Gebel Teir. (It is, to be sure, an emendation (by Jean Bingen), but the editor’s text had read “Themistokles,” who would be welcome too.) Peisistratos is found at Kellis, ‘Ain Waqfa, and Kysis, in a profusion that contrasts with only a handful of Roman instances elsewhere.

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There seems to be some special affection for Spartan names: Pausanias is common, but it is not at all rare in the papyri generally. Agis occurs in one Kellis text, and Agesilaos in an Amheida ostrakon. Agis is otherwise missing from the papyri, and Agesilaos found only in Ptolemaic texts. It is worth noting that the Agis of Kellis is the son of a man named Oueib, the Egyptian word for “priest.” There is nothing Greek about the cultural identity of the father, certainly. Classical Athenian history, by contrast to Spartan, has little distinctive to offer, once the ghostly Themistokles is expunged; we do find Perikles, however, which is not common in the papyri, but hardly such a rarity as Agis and Agesilaos. Perhaps most telling is the extraordinary popularity of the name Isocrates at Douch and ‘Ain Waqfa (although it is unknown at Kellis so far). This name is not at all common in Roman Egypt—a few examples from the first century, then a blank except for an instance in the Marmarica, on the Mediterranean coast, in the late second century. We must presumably associate with the popularity of Isocrates the occurrence of Nikokles, who was an estate manager at Trimithis in the fourth century and signs a number of receipts; Nikokles of Cyprus was the subject of two of Isocrates’ orations. The name appears only in Ptolemaic papyri, otherwise. Demosthenes is also well attested, but at Kellis. Perhaps there was a rivalry between the oases, with Isocrates beloved in Kharga and Demosthenes in Dakhla; but more likely this is just a matter of chance. The great orator’s name is not rare in the papyri, but the instances are mainly Ptolemaic, from the Great Oasis, or from the fourth century on. Theophrastus (known only from Ptolemaic papyri) and Polybius (rare) help to round out the scene on the literary front, and Rhoimetalkas on the historical side—although it is hard in this last case not to suspect a Thracian settler’s name from an earlier period—early Ptolemaic, one would imagine, somehow transmitted to fourth-century Trimithis without ever having been found in Egypt at some earlier point, except in one graffito from the Valley of the Kings. More such names turn up almost every year. What are we to make of this? First, there are two axes of analysis to keep in mind. One is chronological: most of these names, although not quite all, appear elsewhere, principally in the papyri of the Ptolemaic period, when Greeks coming from all over the Hellenic world were settling in Egypt: soldiers from Alexander the Great’s army, Cyrenaeans who entered Ptolemaic service, mercenaries from all over the Aegean and the Greek mainland,

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economic immigrants from many regions. The ranks of Hellenized Egyptians, with their heavy use of theophoric or dynastic names, were not yet so extensive. Over time, it is my general impression, the Greek onomastic repertory in Egypt becomes impoverished; the most popular names occupy a larger share of the total—the power law takes over, in mathematical terms. To a large degree this probably results from the vast popularity of Greek names that could be seen as calques of Egyptian theophoric names (Kronion for Pakoibis, for instance: “son of Kronos” equated to “the man belonging to Geb”) or as sound-alikes for them (for instance, Sokrates for Sobek- names in the Fayyum, deriving from the local crocodile god). No doubt the loss of a sense of connection with the immigrants’ homelands played a part as well, with those names that had a locally distinctive flavor disappearing in favor of more familiar ones. This process has apparently never been studied, but it would be worth the trouble to do so. It is part of the formation of a Graeco-Egyptian identity shared by the descendants of immigrants and by those of the Egyptians who had taken positions in the royal system of Ptolemaic Egypt. The last vestiges of the old names can be seen in the first century CE. By the second century, the Graeco-Egyptian synthesis is complete. But then some of the old names came back. This happens only after the mid-third century, and during the Tetrarchy and the fourth century we find more of the old Greek names than appear in the second-century papyri and those of the early third. Still, only part of the repertory returns. It is not as if the ancestral names had been found in papers in the attic and revived for a newer generation, as if an American today were to find an ancestor of 1794 named Elnathan and stick that name on his unsuspecting infant. The source must be elsewhere. The second axis is geographical. Because we have no more than a trivial number of documents from the first 250 years of Roman rule in the oases, there is little to go on there. We do not know what was going on in Kharga and Dakhla in the period from Augustus to the Gordians in the mid-third century. But when the revival of classical onomastics comes, it is far more marked in the Great Oasis than anywhere else. The percentage of attestations of many of these names that belong to the oasite documentation is far out of proportion to the weight of this documentation in the total volume of Egyptian papyri and ostraka. Many of the names appear in texts from both Kharga and Dakhla. We have no documents to speak of from Siwa, alas, and not much from

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Bahariya, although recent Czech excavations have found ostraka, not yet published. Since our textual evidence from the oases is still very limited in geographical and chronological extent, the non-occurrence of any given name in Dakhla or in Kharga may be a fluke. There is a third axis, that of gender. We know that the repertory of women’s names in the papyri tends to be dominated, even more than the men’s is, by the Egyptian element, and that in the same family we will find more of the men with Greek names than of the women, no matter how high their social standing. The situation with the oasis texts, where none of the names mentioned are women’s, may be nothing more than another instantiation of the same rule. We have yet to discover whether there is more to it than that. • The strongly local character of the attachment to names drawn from the Greek educational curriculum points to one of the recurrent themes of this book, the tension between the general and the particular. In many ways, what we find in the Great Oasis in the Roman period can be paralleled anywhere in Egypt that we find similar textual and material evidence. But distinctive traits are also very noticeable. We have commented on the reasons inherent in the physical geography that financial capital necessarily played a more important role in the oasis than in the Nile valley, and the likelihood that disparities in wealth between the assetowning part of society and those who worked for them as cultivators or transporters were more pronounced than elsewhere. Perhaps the attachment to Greek paideia is connected to this stratification. The strong presence of domestic wall-painting may also be a witness of upper-class assertion of identity. Survey work in 2015 showed that the house of Serenos was far from alone at Trimithis in being decorated with Roman painting. The geographical remoteness of the Dakhla Oasis can easily tempt one to think of it as peripheral. That does not seem to us a useful concept. If anything, our work at Amheida leads us to think that a center-periphery model is a poor description of the later Roman world. The centrality of capital investment and concentration of wealth, with the accompanying upper-class devotion to classical culture, may more plausibly be seen as a foretaste of what we see in the sixth-century Egypt of Dioskoros of Aphrodito. These characteristics are not absent from

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the cities of the valley in the fourth century, but they may be present in more concentrated form in the oasis. It would be interesting to see if the urbanism of those valley cities develops in ways parallel to what we see at Amheida, or if the physical form of fourth-century Trimithis is the product of the climate rather than culture. That is an important item on the agenda for further research. That agenda is crowded. All of us, and other members of our team as well, have hopes and goals for continued work at Amheida for many years to come. The site is vast, and new surprises greet us each year. We have yet to locate Ptolemaic Trimithis (if it was called that already in the Hellenistic period), or to excavate residential quarters from the first centuries of Roman rule, or to investigate the sprawling cemeteries around the city, or to open the deep trenches on the temple hill that could find an Old Kingdom level. Although the town has been mapped, that is not yet true of the necropolis, and new quarters of the town, previously unseen, can emerge from under the moving sand dunes at any moment. Non-invasive methods have contributed much to our understanding of the site, but magnetometry has been of less help than at most sites because the mud bricks blend into the background fill. We need to keep excavating. The intensification of the surrounding agriculture worries us, but rushing excavation does not seem a solution; applying the stratigraphic method yields far more information than we could get in any other way. The exhilaration of integrating texts and contexts depends entirely on precise stratigraphy. Realizing our goals depends, of course, on the ability to sustain fieldwork and protect the site. Although Egypt has so far been more fortunate than most of its neighbors, we are more acutely aware than ever that the safeguarding of ancient sites depends on the stability and efficacy of national governments. Our beautiful and calm oasis has been an optimal place to work during the past decade, and we hope that it will remain so, allowing these first glimpses of an oasis city to be enriched by many more to come.

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Abbreviations Classical authors are cited according to the abbreviations in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, third edition. Papyri and ostraka are referred to by the standard abbreviations, of which a complete list is to be found at http://www.papyri.info/docs/checklist. Those used here are: O.Krok. = Ostraca de Krokodilô, ed. H. Cuvigny. I, La correspondance militaire et sa circulation. Cairo 2005 (Fouilles de l’Ifao 51). O.Trim. 1 = Amheida I: Ostraka from Trimithis Volume 1: Texts from the 2004–2007 Seasons, ed. R.S. Bagnall and G.R. Ruffini, with contributions by R. Cribiore and G. Vittmann. New York 2012. Online : http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/amheida-i-otrim-1/. O.Trim. 2 = Amheida 3: Ostraka from Trimithis Volume 2: Greek Texts from the 2008–2013 seasons, ed. R. Ast and R.S. Bagnall, with contributions by C. Caputo and R. Cribiore. New York, forthcoming. P.Kell. = Papyri from Kellis. Oxford: I, Greek Papyri from Kellis I, ed. K. A. Worp, with contributions by J. E. G. Whitehorne and R.W. Daniel. 1995 (Dakhleh Oasis Project: Monograph No. 3). II, Kellis Literary Texts, ed. I. Gardner, with contributions by S. Clackson, M. Franzmann, and K. A. Worp. 1996 (Dakhleh Oasis Project: Monograph No. 4). III, The Kellis Isocrates Codex, ed. K.A. Worp and A. Rijksbaron. 1997 (Dakhleh Oasis Project: Monograph No. 5). IV, The Kellis Agricultural Account Book, ed. R. S. Bagnall, with contributions by C. A. Hope, R. G. Jenkins, A. J. Mills, J. L. Sharpe, U. Thanheiser, and G. Wagner. 1997 (Dakhleh Oasis Project: Monograph No. 7). 219

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V, Coptic Documentary Texts from Kellis I, ed. I. Gardner, A. Alcock, and W.-P. Funk, with a contribution by C. A. Hope and G. E. Bowen. 1999 (Dakhleh Oasis Project: Monograph No. 9). VI, The Kellis Literary Texts Volume 2, ed. I. Gardner with contributions by M. Choat, M. Franzmann, and K. A. Worp. 2007 (Dakhleh Oasis Project: Monograph No. 15). VII, Coptic Documentary Texts from Kellis II, ed. I. Gardner. 2014 (Dakhleh Oasis Project: Monograph No. 16). P.Lips. = Griechische Urkunden der Papyrussammlung zu Leipzig, I, ed. L. Mitteis. Leipzig 1906. P.Oxy. = The Oxyrhynchus Papyri. London 1898 to present; 80 volumes to date. P.Ryl. 4 = Catalogue of the Greek and Latin Papyri in the John Rylands Library, Manchester. IV, Documents of the Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine Periods, ed. C. H. Roberts and E. G. Turner. Manchester 1952. P.Sijp. = Papyri in Memory of P. J. Sijpesteijn, ed. A. J. B. Sirks and K. A. Worp. Oakville, Conn. 2007 (Am.Stud.Pap. 40).

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Index apse 124, 127–30, 136, 139–40, 143–4, 146–7, 162 arable crops 30–31 Ares 200, 201 arriccio 195 Bagawat, wall paintings 210 Bahariya Oasis 54, 56, 149–151, 156, 172, 216 basilica 129, 144–5, 147 bath, Roman (see also thermae) 19, 65, 67, 76–87 Bay of Naples 193 benches 122, 130, 136–7, 139–40, 145 Berenike 150 Bes 101 Bir el-Shaghala (Mut) 112 bone collagen 155 bricks, sizes of 171 burials 128, 130, 137–8, 145; see also tombs, graves buzzards 57 Cambyses 51–53 camel 30, 151–2, 156, 175 camps, military 170–2 capital, investment 29, 174 caravan routes 156

‘Ain Asil 35, 38–41 ‘Ain el-Gazzareen 6, 41 ‘Ain Manawir 58, 59 ‘Ain Asil (Balat) 6, 73, 150 ‘Ain Birbiyeh 110, 117, 133 ‘Ain el-Gedida 33, 130, 135, 139–44, 147, 157–9, 161–70 ‘Ain es-Sabil 135, 138, 147, 160, 168–9 ‘Ain Manawir 151 Abydos 58 administration 168 agriculture 157, 166–8 Ala I Quadorum 170–1 Alexandria 65; style of art 212; wallpaintings 208 n. 29, 210 alum 150–1 Amasis (Ahmose II) 22–3, 38, 47, 49–51, 53, 56 Amenemhat II 40 Amun, Amun-Re 23, 27–8, 46, 50–1, 53, 57, 117, 132–3 Amun-Nakht 117 Anatolia 200 Andromeda 199, 207, 211 n. 39 Antaiopolite nome 156 Aphrodite 200, 201 237

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catacombs, Rome 205 cavalry archers 171 cemeteries 155 ceramics 139–40, 143, 146, 160, 163–4, 166; see also pottery Christ 205 Christian names 118, 131 Christians, Christianity 119, 127–30, 134– 7, 139–40, 144–5, 147–8; in wall paint ings 205–6; in textiles 211 churches 119–30; 135–47, 160, 162–3, 165–7 clergy 131, 134 coffin 57–8, 60 coins 140, 146, 163 colonnades 122–3, 139, 145 columbarium 160; see also pigeon tow ers columns 122, 124, 136, 139, 147 Constantius II 134 convivium 203 Coptic 133, 141, 147, 163 cotton 154–5, 175 crypt 128–130 Dakhla Oasis passim Dakhleh Oasis Project (= DOP) 1, 5, 11, 13–14 18, 41, 66, 87, 112 Daphne 202 Darb Farafra 66 Darius I 38, 47, 53–6 dates 152 deacons 134 decoration (geometric) 126–7 Deir Abu Matta 128, 130, 135–6, 144–6 Deir el-Hagar 1, 23, 25–8, 41, 109–10 Deir el-Molouk 135, 146–7 Dendera 110 dipinto 182–3, 185–7, 191 Domitian 28, 38, 109–10 donkey 30, 156, 175 Douch, ostraka from 176 Drovetti, B. 8–9, 112 Dynasties: 4th 41; 6th 38, 41; 12th 40; 13th 39–40; 19th 38, 40; 20th 21, 38; 23rd 38; 26th 38, 60; 27th 38

eagle 57 Early Dynastic period 40 Eastern Desert 172 Edfu 110 Edmonstone, A. 8–9, 112 education 175, 180–2 El-Deir (Kharga) 171 El-Muzawwaqa cemetery 23, 41, 128, 206, 207; tomb of Petosiris 206–208 El-Qasr (Dakhla) 4, 9, 11–12, 18, 23, 35, 47–8, 66, 73, 105, 107, 170–3 Electra 211 Ephesos, Turkey 206 epoikion 167–9 estates 153, 167 Euripides 191–2 Europa 202 Eurykleia 200–1 Fakhry, A. 8–9 Farafra Oasis 149, 171 Faustianus son of Aquila 175 fertilizer 31 figs 152 First Intermediate period 39–41 flax 175 Ganymede 202 gender, as factor in naming 216 georgion 168 graffiti 23, 25, 27, 109, 131–4, 141, 170, 213–4 grain 154 grammarians 190–1 graves 130 Great Oasis 1, 6, 29, 116, 129, 149–51, 155, 170, 172–3, 214–6; see also Dakhla, Kharga Greater Dakhla Stela (Oxford) 21–3, 45–6 Greek 126, 141, 157, 163 Hadrian 38, 110 Harpokrates 207, 208 Herakles 187 Hermes 187 Hermopolite nome (el-Ashmunein) 156 Herodotus 51–2

Index Heron 208 Hibis 21, 23, 50, 53, 56, 133, 173, 175 Homer, as source of names 213; Iliad 200; Odyssey 189, 200–1 Horus 57, 117 hydreuma see wells ibis 57 illegitimacy 176–7 inequality 174–7 inscriptions 126, 141 insecurity 172–3 intonaco 195 Isis 208 Islamic period 66 Ismant el-Kharab see Kellis Isocrates 214 isotopes, stable 155 John Moschus 173 Kafr Samir 73 Karanis, house B50, wall-paintings of Isis, Harpokrates and Heron 208–10 Kellis (Ismant el-Kharab) 1, 4, 5, 7, 10, 30, 61, 73, 75, 86, 89, 97, 104, 110, 117, 119, 127–30, 135–8, 140, 143–4, 147–8, 150, 152–5, 157, 160, 168–71, 174–5, 179, 193, 195, 208, 210, 212–14; B/3/1 paintings 193, 195, 208 Kellis Agricultural Account Book 4, 7, 152, 154, 169, 174–5 Kemyt school text 42–3 kestrel 57 Kharga Oasis 3, 6, 9, 29, 40, 45, 53–4, 56, 58, 89, 119, 121–2, 127, 129, 135–6, 149–51, 155, 171–3, 176, 213–6 kites 57 Kom el-Dikka 181–2 Kysis, nekrotaphoi of 176 Late Period 38, 57, 60, 109 Legio II Traiana 171 Lepsius, K.R. 1, 9 Libya 45, 46, 116, 149 Lykopolis (Assiut) 156 Mamluk period 35 managers 154, 175 Manichaean texts 5

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mastaba 122; see also benches Mazikes 173 Medusa 199 Mesobe 30, 168 metal 150 Middle Kingdom 40 military 170–2 millet, pearl 155 monasticism 135 Mons Claudianus 150 Mons Porphyrites 150 mosaic 81, 86 Mothis see Mut el-Kharab Mut el-Kharab (Mothis) 4, 6, 8, 21, 23, 30, 40–1, 45–6, 66, 110, 112, 117, 136, 148, 157, 171–2 Myos Hormos 150 names, personal 116–8, 131–2, 212–6 naos 165 Naqada culture 40 nave 122, 124, 129–30, 139–41, 144–5, 147 necropolis 127 Nehmet-Away of Setwah/Trimithis 27, 49–50 Nekau II 38, 47–9, 54 nekrotaphoi of Kysis 176 Neolithic 6 New Kingdom 38–9, 60 Notitia Dignitatum 170–1 Odysseus 200, 210 Oedipus 211 Old Kingdom 6, 14, 17, 18, 38–41, 64, 66, 150, 154 olive presses 33 olives, olive oil 152 Orpheus 203, 205 Osiris 47, 58–60, 115, 117 Ostia, Italy 206 ostrakon 138, 146, 152–4, 157, 163, 166, 168 Ottoman period 35, 64, 105 paideia 203 Panopolite nome (Akhmim) 156 papyrus 2

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pastophorion 128–9, 140, 143, 145, 147 Penelope 210, 211 n. 39 Perseus 199, 207, 211 n. 39 Persian period 58, 151–2 Petubastis IV 38, 47, 51–4 Phrygian cap 200, 205 pigeon towers 31, 160, 167, 169–70; see also columbarium pits (burial) 128, 130 platforms 124, 126, 129, 136, 139, 141, 160 Plutarch 189–90 pmoun (well) 154, 169 Polis 203, 204 pottery 33, 163–5, 167; see also ceramics pronaos 165 Psamtik II 38, 47, 48 Psamtik III 51 Ptolemaic period 29 pulpit 122 pyramid 14, 41, 75, 112 Qusur, El- 165 Ramesses IX 38, 45 Red Monastery Church, Sohag 210 roads 173 Rohlfs, G. 8, 9 Saite period 151 sanctuary 128–30, 137, 139, 144–5, 147 saqia 77 Sawahet, Egyptian name for Amheida 21–2, 44–5 school at Amheida: Room 13 191; Room 15 185–7; Room 19 188–90 school exercises 180, 183 schools in antiquity 180–2 seasonality 170 sebbakh 35, 105 Second Intermediate period 17, 39–41 Serenos, house of Serenos 18, 68, 73–77, 79, 81, 86–92, 94–95, 98–99, 102, 152– 4, 175 Sesostris I 40 Seth 23, 24, 49, 50, 117 Seti II 7, 38, 42, 44 Setwah, Egyptian name for Amheida 22, 27, 47, 49

Shai 117 Shams ed-Din 122, 129–30 Siwa Oasis 56, 132, 149–50, 215 skeletons 128 Small Oasis see Bahariya Oasis Southern Oasis 45, 52–4 stibadium 89–90, 98 stone, building 150 tablets, clay 6 Takeloth III 23, 38, 45 temples 119, 130, 135, 164–6 Tentyrites 171 tetradrachms 66 textiles and weaving 151, 175 theophoric names 116–8 thermae (see also bath, Roman) 67, 77, 83, 85 Thoth of Setwah/Trimithis 8, 23, 27–8, 42, 44–5, 47, 49–50, 53, 57–8, 64, 109– 10, 118, 133, 187 Tineida 165 Titus 28, 38, 109 tombs 127–8 transportation 6, 10, 29–30, 155–6, 172, 175 trees 31 Trojans, Trojan War 200 true (buon) Fresco 195 Tuna el-Gebel 211 Tutu 117 vaults/vaulted 121, 127–8, 138, 140–1, 143, 160, 162 Vesuvius 193 villages 135–6, 148, 157, 166–7 wells 29–30, 33, 153–4, 157, 172–3 Wilkinson, J.G. 8, 9 wine 154 wooden tablets 185 workshops 140, 164–8 Zacharias of Mytilene 182 Zeugma, Turkey 206 Zeus 202