A detailed archaeological study of life in Egypt's Eastern desert during the Roman period by a leading scholar

Rome in Egypt’s Eastern Desert is a two-volume set collecting Hélène Cuvigny’s most important articles on Egypt’s Eastern Desert during the Roman period. The excavations she directed uncovered a wealth of material, including tens of thousands of texts written on pottery fragments (ostraca). Some are administrative texts, but many more are correspondence, both official and private, written by and to the people (mostly but not all men) who lived and worked in these remote and harsh environments, supported by an elaborate network of defense, administration, and supply that tied the entire region together. The contents of Rome in Egypt’s Eastern Desert have all been published earlier in peer-reviewed venues, but most appear here for the first time in English. All of the contributions have been checked or translated by the editor and brought up to date with respect to bibliography, and some have been significantly rewritten by the author, in order to take account of the enormous amount of new material discovered since the original publications. A full index makes this body of work far more accessible than it was before. This book assembles into one collection thirty years of detailed study of this material, conjuring in vivid detail the lived experience of those who inhabited these forts—often through their own expressive language—and the realia of desert geography, military life, sex, religion, quarry operations, and imperial administration in the Roman world.

A collection of studies that explores the extractive systems of eleven ancient states and societies from across the ancient world

Ancient Taxation is a collection of studies that explores the extractive systems of eleven ancient states and societies from across the ancient world, ranging from Bronze Age China to Anglo-Saxon Britain. The contributors discuss the inherent challenges of taxation in predominantly agro-pastoral societies, including basic tax strategy (e.g., taxing goods vs. labor, in-kind vs. money taxes, etc.); the mechanics of assessment and collection; and the politics of negotiating the cooperation of social, economic, and political élites and other important social groups.

In assembling a broad range of studies, this book sheds new light on the commonalities and differences between ancient taxation systems, and so on the broader fiscal and institutional practices of antiquity. It also provides new impetus for further comparative research into extractive practices across ancient societies and between antiquity and recent historical periods.

The book will be of interest to those studying ancient social and economic history, the history of social organization, and the history of ancient Greece and Rome, Egypt, the Ancient Near East, or ancient China.

A comprehensive archaeological study of the ceramic finds from a house in Amheida

The House of Serenos: Part I: The Pottery (Amheida V) is a comprehensive full-color catalog and analysis of the ceramic finds from the late antique house of a local notable and adjacent streets in Amheida. It is the fifth book in the Amheida series.

Amheida is located in the western part of the Dakhla oasis, 3.5 km south of the medieval town of El-Qasr. Known in Hellenistic and Roman times as Trimithis, Amheida became a polis by 304 CE and was a major administrative center of the western part of the oasis for the whole of the fourth century. The home’s owner was one Serenos, a member of the municipal elite and a Trimithis city councillor, as we know from documents found in the house. His house is particularly well preserved with respect to floor plan, relationship to the contemporary urban topography, and decoration, including domestic display spaces plastered and painted with subjects drawn from Greek mythology and scenes depicting the family that owned the house. The archaeology from the site also reveals the ways in which the urban space changed over time, as Serenos’s house was built over and expanded into some previously public spaces. The house was probably abandoned around or soon after 370 CE. The pottery analyzed in this volume helps to refine the relationship of the archaeological layers belonging to the élite house and the layers below it; it also sheds light on the domestic and economic life of the household and region, from cooking and dining to the management of a complex agricultural economy in which ceramics were the most common form of container for basic commodities.

The book will be of interest to specialists interested in ceramology, Roman Egypt, and the material culture, social history, and economy of late antiquity.

The fourth volume in the Amheida series, ‘Ain el-Gedida: 2006-2008 Excavations of a Late Antique Site in Egypt's Western Desert (Amheida IV) presents the systematic record and interpretation of the archaeological evidence from the excavations at ‘Ain el-Gedida, a fourth-century rural settlement in Egypt's Dakleh Oasis uniquely important for the study of early Egyptian Christianity and previously known only from written sources.

Nicola Aravecchia (Washington University), the Deputy Field Director of NYU's Amheida Excavations, offers a history of the site and its excavations, followed by an integrated topographical and archaeological interpretation of the site and its significance for the history of Christianity in Egypt. In the second half of the volume a team of international experts presents catalogs and interpretations of the archaeological finds, including ceramics (Delphine Dixneuf, CRNS), coins (David M. Ratzan, NYU), ostraca and graffiti (Roger S. Bagnall, NYU and Dorota Dzierzbicka, University of Warsaw), small finds (Dorota Dzierzbicka, University of Warsaw), and zooarcheological remains (Pamela J. Crabtree, NYU and Douglas Campana).

This volume presents 455 inscribed pottery fragments, or ostraka,
found during NYU’s excavations at Amheida in the western desert of Egypt. The
majority date to the Late Roman period (3rd to 4th century AD), a time of rapid
social change in Egypt and the ancient Mediterranean generally. Amheida was a
small administrative center, and the full publication of these brief texts
illuminates the role of writing in the daily lives of its inhabitants. The
subjects covered by the Amheida ostraka include the distribution of food, the
administration of wells, the commercial lives of inhabitants, their education,
and other aspects of life neglected in literary sources. The authors provide a
full introduction to the technical aspects of terminology and chronology, while
also situating this important evidence in its historical, social and regional
context.





Online edition available as part of the NYU Library's Ancient World Digital Library and in partnership with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW).

Scattered through the vast expanse of stone and sand that makes up Egypt’s Western Desert are several oases. These islands of green in the midst of the Sahara owe their existence to springs and wells drawing on ancient aquifers. In antiquity, as today, they supported agricultural communities, going back to Neolithic times but expanding greatly in the millennium from the Saite pharaohs to the Roman emperors. New technologies of irrigation and transportation made the oases integral parts of an imperial economy.

Amheida, ancient Trimithis, was one of those oasis communities. Located in the western part of the Dakhla Oasis, it was an important regional center, reaching a peak in the Roman period before being abandoned. Over the past decade, excavations at this well-preserved site have revealed its urban layout and brought to light houses, streets, a bath, a school, and a church. The only standing brick pyramid of the Roman period in Egypt has been restored. Wall-paintings, temple reliefs, pottery, and texts all contribute to give a lively sense of its political, religious, economic, and cultural life. This book presents these aspects of the city’s existence and its close ties to the Nile valley, by way of long desert roads, in an accessible and richly illustrated fashion.

This archaeological report provides a comprehensive study of the excavations carried out at Amheida House B2 in Egypt's Dakhleh Oasis between 2005 and 2007, followed by three study seasons between 2008 and 2010. The excavations at Amheida in Egypt's western desert, begun in 2001 under the aegis of Columbia University and sponsored by NYU since 2008, are investigating all aspects of social life and material culture at the administrative center of ancient Trimithis. The excavations so far have focused on three areas of this very large site: a centrally located upper-class fourth-century AD house with wall paintings, an adjoining school, and underlying remains of a Roman bath complex; a more modest house of the third century; and the temple hill, with remains of the Temple of Thoth built in the first century AD and of earlier structures. Architectural conservation has protected and partly restored two standing funerary monuments, a mud-brick pyramid and a tower tomb, both of the Roman period.

This is the second volume of ostraka from the excavations Amheida (ancient Trimithis) in Egypt. It adds 491 items to the growing corpus of primary texts from the site. In addition to the catalog, the introductory sections make important contributions to understanding the role of textual practice in the life of a pre-modern small town. Issues addressed include tenancy, the administration of water, governance, the identification of individuals in the archaeological record, the management of estates, personal handwriting, and the uses of personal names. Additionally, the chapter "Ceramic Fabrics and Shapes” by Clementina Caputo breaks new ground in the treatment of these inscribed shards as both written text and physical object. This volume will be of interest to specialists in Roman-period Egypt as well as to scholars of literacy and writing in the ancient world and elsewhere.

This archaeological report provides a comprehensive study of the excavations carried out at Amheida House B2 in Egypt's Dakhleh Oasis between 2005 and 2007, followed by three study seasons between 2008 and 2010.

The excavations at Amheida in Egypt's western desert, begun in 2001 under the aegis of Columbia University and sponsored by NYU since 2008, are investigating all aspects of social life and material culture at the administrative center of ancient Trimithis. The excavations so far have focused on three areas of this very large site: a centrally located upper-class fourth-century AD house with wall paintings, an adjoining school, and underlying remains of a Roman bath complex; a more modest house of the third century; and the temple hill, with remains of the Temple of Thoth built in the first century AD and of earlier structures. Architectural conservation has protected and partly restored two standing funerary monuments, a mud-brick pyramid and a tower tomb, both of the Roman period.





This volume presents and discusses the architecture, artifacts and ecofacts recovered from B2 in a holistic manner, which has rarely before been attempted in a full report on the excavation of a Romano-Egyptian house. The primary aim of this volume is to combine an architectural and material-based study with an explicitly contextual and theoretical analysis. In so doing, it develops a methodology and presents a case study of how the rich material remains of Romano-Egyptian houses may be used to investigate the relationship between domestic remains and social identity.

Until very recently, the idea of ancient Jewish sciences would have been considered unacceptable. Since the 1990s, Early Modern and Medieval Science in Jewish sources has been actively studied, but the consensus was that no real scientific themes could be found in earlier Judaism. This work points them out in detail and posits a new field of research: the scientific activity evident in the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Jewish pseudepigrapha. The publication of new texts and new analyses of older ones reveals crucial elements that are best illuminated by the history of science, and may have interesting consequences for it. The contributors evaluate these texts in relation to astronomy, astrology, and physiognomy, marking the first comprehensive attempt to account
for scientific themes in Second Temple Judaism. They investigate the meaning and purpose of scientific explorations in an apocalyptic setting. An appreciation of these topics paves the way to a renewed understanding of the scientific fragments scattered throughout rabbinic literature.

The book first places the Jewish material in the ancient context of the Near Eastern and Hellenistic worlds. While the Jewish texts were not on the cutting edge of scientific discovery, they find a meaningful place in the history of science, between Babylonia and Egypt, in the time period between Hipparchus and Ptolemy. The
book uses recent advances in method to examine the contacts and networks of Jewish scholars in their ancient setting. Second, the essays here tackle the problematic concept of a national scientific tradition. Although science is nowadays often conceived as universal, the historiography of ancient Jewish sciences demonstrates
the importance of seeing the development of science in a local context. The book explores the tension between the hegemony of central scientific traditions and local scientific enterprises, showing the relevance of ancient data to contemporary postcolonial historiography of science. Finally, philosophical questions of the demarcation of science are addressed in a way that can advance the discussion of related ancient materials.

Online edition available as part of the NYU Library's Ancient World Digital Library and in partnership with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW).

Aksum and Nubia assembles and analyzes the textual and archaeological
evidence of interaction between Nubia and the Ethiopian
kingdom of Aksum, focusing primarily on the fourth century
CE. Although ancient Nubia and Ethiopia have been the subject
of a growing number of studies in recent years, little attention has
been given to contact between these two regions. Hatke argues
that ancient Northeast Africa cannot be treated as a unified area
politically, economically, or culturally. Rather, Nubia and Ethiopia
developed within very different regional spheres of interaction, as
a result of which the Nubian kingdom of Kush came to focus its
energies on the Nile Valley, relying on this as its main route of
contact with the outside world, while Aksum was oriented towards
the Red Sea and Arabia. In this way Aksum and Kush coexisted
in peace for most of their history, and such contact as they maintained
with each other was limited to small-scale commerce. Only
in the fourth century CE did Aksum take up arms against Kush,
and even then the conflict seems to have been related mainly to
security issues on Aksum’s western frontier.






Although Aksum never managed to hold onto Kush for long, much
less dealt the final death-blow to the Nubian kingdom, as is often
believed, claims to Kush continued to play a role in Aksumite royal
ideology as late as the sixth century. Aksum and Nubia critically
examines the extent to which relations between two ancient African
states were influenced by warfare, commerce, and political
fictions.

Online edition available as part of the NYU Library's Ancient World Digital Library and in partnership with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW).

An in-depth archaeological report
featuring graffiti found during a recent excavation at the Ancient Greek city
of Smyrna.

The graffiti published in this richly-illustrated volume were discovered during an excavation of the Roman basilica in the Ancient Greek city of Smyrna, known today as Izmir, which is situated on the Aegean coast of modern Turkey. The project, which began in 2003, has unearthed a multitude of graffiti and drawings encompassing a wide range of subjects and interests, including local politics, nautical vessels, sex, and wordplay.

Each graffito artifact holds the potential for vast historical and cultural data, rescued in this volume from the passage of time and razing ambitions of urban development. Given the city’s history, the potential wealth of knowledge to be gleamed from these discoveries is substantial: Smyrna has an uninterrupted history of settlement since the Neolithic–Copper ages, and remains today a major city and Mediterranean seaport at the crossroads of key trade routes.

The present volume provides comprehensive editions of the texts, descriptions of the drawings, and an extensive introduction to the subjects of the graffiti, how they were produced, and who was responsible for them. A complete set of color photographs is included.

An archaeological, historical, and art historical study of a remarkable early church excavated at Amheida in Egypt's Dakhla Oasis

Early Christianity at Amheida (Egypt’s Dakhla Oasis): A Fourth-Century Church. Volume 1: The Excavations is an archaeological, historical, and art historical study of a remarkable basilica-church excavated at Amheida in Dakhla Oasis. This church, excavated between 2012 and 2023, dates to the fourth century CE and therefore is among the earliest purpose-built churches in Egypt. It also contains one of the oldest, if not the oldest, excavated Christian funerary crypts in the country. The church at Amheida thus offers a wealth of new data on early Christianity in Egypt, particularly with respect to the earliest phases of Christian art and architecture and burial customs. Aravecchia presents a systematic treatment of the stratigraphy, building techniques, materials, features, architecture, decoration, and finds of the church, carefully contextualized in the early Christianity of the late antique Great Oasis and Egypt more broadly.

New insights from the archaeology and pottery of the sanctuary of Hermes and Aphrodite at Syme Viannou, Crete

The Sanctuary of Hermes and Aphrodite at Syme Viannou VII: The Greek and Roman Pottery presents in two volumes the Greek and Roman pottery recovered from the excavation of the sanctuary of Syme Viannou, one of the most long-lived and important cult sites of ancient Crete and the Aegean. The site, which is known as the Cretan Delphi, was dedicated to Hermes and Aphrodite for much of its history. The present study analyzes and catalogs 865 pieces, dating from across the early first millennium BCE to the mid-first millennium CE. Kotsonas integrates traditional typological and chronological inquiries with contextual considerations, macroscopic and petrographic analyses of ceramic fabrics, and quantitative studies. The resulting work provides detailed documentation of the pottery from Syme Viannou and explores its ritual and other roles within the diachronic panorama of cultic and other activities at the site. It also supports a broader understanding of the role of ceramics in sanctuary contexts by introducing systematically comparative perspectives on the evidence of pottery from other Cretan and Greek sanctuaries.

Volume 1 provides an introduction to the site of the sanctuary of Syme Viannou and its history, and contains an analytical catalog of the ceramic remains.

New insights from the archaeology and pottery of the sanctuary of Hermes and Aphrodite at Syme Viannou, Crete

The Sanctuary of Hermes and Aphrodite at Syme Viannou VII: The Greek and Roman Pottery presents in two volumes the Greek and Roman pottery recovered from the excavation of the sanctuary of Syme Viannou, one of the most long-lived and important cult sites of ancient Crete and the Aegean. The site, which is known as the Cretan Delphi, was dedicated to Hermes and Aphrodite for much of its history. The present study analyzes and catalogs 865 pieces, dating from across the early first millennium BCE to the mid-first millennium CE. Kotsonas integrates traditional typological and chronological inquiries with contextual considerations, macroscopic and petrographic analyses of ceramic fabrics, and quantitative studies. The resulting work provides detailed documentation of the pottery from Syme Viannou and explores its ritual and other roles within the diachronic panorama of cultic and other activities at the site. It also supports a broader understanding of the role of ceramics in sanctuary contexts by introducing systematically comparative perspectives on the evidence of pottery from other Cretan and Greek sanctuaries.

Volume 2 presents synthetic studies of the material, exploring the use of different ceramic fabrics, the relationship between the form and function of the vessels, and the place of ceramic items in the cultic practice and daily life at the sanctuary in Greek and Roman antiquity.

Comparative insights on astronomy, divination, and medicine from ancient texts

Scientific Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East presents a collection of articles by leading scholars on scientific practices in the ancient world, with emphasis on the fields of medicine, astronomy, astrology, and other forms of divination. The essays engage with a wide variety of textual sources in many different languages and scripts from Egypt and the Near East spanning more than a millennium, including some texts that are edited and discussed here for the first time. The contributors to this volume were tasked with approaching their texts not only as specialists, but also from a cross-cultural perspective, and the resulting body of work reveals new and exciting evidence for the transfer of scientific knowledge across cultural borders in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East.

This book will be of interest primarily to specialists in the history of medicine, science, divination, and magic, as well as to papyrologists, Egyptologists, and Assyriologists.

A comprehensive study of the archaeology of the House of Serenos


The House of Serenos, Part II is the second of four books devoted to publishing the archaeology of the House of Serenos, a richly decorated, late antique villa of a local élite, located in Amheida (ancient Trimithis) in the Dakhla Oasis of Egypt. The House of Serenos, Part II synthesizes the archaeological information presented in detail in other volumes in a comprehensive study of the architectural and archaeological history of the house and its relationship to its natural and built environments, from construction through expansion and renovation to its eventual abandonment around the end of the fourth century. The volume includes discussions of archaeological method, stratigraphy, architecture, and the archaeological assemblages discovered in the House of Serenos—and reveals what all this can tell us about the inhabitants and their experience living in this high-status residence at the edge of the Roman Empire.

A comprehensive edition and commentary of 77 ostraka

Ostraka in the Collection of New York University is a comprehensive edition and commentary of 77 ostraka, or potsherds with ancient texts written on them, from Greco-Roman and late antique Egypt. Seventy-two of these ostraca are housed in NYU Special Collections, originally purchased by Caspar Kraemer in 1932, then the chair of the NYU Classics Department. Although Kraemer advertised the imminent publication of the texts in 1934 and later collaborated with the famed papyrologist Herbert Youtie, neither completed the project. The ostraka in this small collection span the 2nd century BCE to the 8th century CE and include both Greek and Coptic texts. The majority, however, form a coherent dossier of tax receipts related to mortuary activities in Upper Egypt during the reign of Augustus (texts 7-70, dated from roughly the last quarter of the 1st century BCE to 12 CE). The five ostraka published in this volume not held by NYU include one that had been part of Kraemer’s original purchase but was subsequently lost (thankfully preserved in a photograph in Youtie’s archive at the University of Michigan), and four ostraka now held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The latter four texts were purchased separately and published previously, but clearly belong to the same group of texts. They are included in this volume both for the sake of completeness and because the present authors were able to improve the readings in light of the context provided by the dossier as a whole. In addition to the scholarly edition of these texts, the volume contains a full discussion of their provenance, the taxes involved, the taxpayers and tax-collectors, and a ceramological analysis of the sherds as media for these texts.


The book will be of interest primarily to specialists in papyrology and scholars who study the economic history of the ancient Mediterranean, Hellenistic Egypt, the Roman empire, and papyrology.

A detailed archaeological study of life in Egypt's Eastern desert during the Roman period by a leading scholar

Rome in Egypt’s Eastern Desert is a two-volume set collecting Hélène Cuvigny’s most important articles on Egypt’s Eastern Desert during the Roman period. The excavations she directed uncovered a wealth of material, including tens of thousands of texts written on pottery fragments (ostraca). Some are administrative texts, but many more are correspondence, both official and private, written by and to the people (mostly but not all men) who lived and worked in these remote and harsh environments, supported by an elaborate network of defense, administration, and supply that tied the entire region together. The contents of Rome in Egypt’s Eastern Desert have all been published earlier in peer-reviewed venues, but most appear here for the first time in English. All of the contributions have been checked or translated by the editor and brought up to date with respect to bibliography, and some have been significantly rewritten by the author, in order to take account of the enormous amount of new material discovered since the original publications. A full index makes this body of work far more accessible than it was before. This book assembles into one collection thirty years of detailed study of this material, conjuring in vivid detail the lived experience of those who inhabited these forts—often through their own expressive language—and the realia of desert geography, military life, sex, religion, quarry operations, and imperial administration in the Roman world.