Books in the ISAW Monographs series

Critically examines the extent to which relations between two ancient African states were influenced by warfare, commerce, and political fictions

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

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.

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.

A comprehensive edition and commentary of a late antique codexMathematics, Metrology, and Model Contracts is a comprehensive edition and commentary of a late antique codex. The codex contains mathematical problems, metrological tables, and model contracts. Given the nature of the contents, the format, and quality of the Greek, the editors conclude that the codex most likely belonged to a student in a school devoted to training business agents and similar professionals. The editors present here the first full scholarly edition of the text, with complete discussions of the provenance, codicology, and philology of the surviving manuscript. They also provide extensive notes and illustrations for the mathematical problems and model contracts, as well as historical commentary on what this text reveals about late antique numeracy, literacy, education, and vocational training in what we would now see as business, law, and administration.The book will be of interest to papyrologists and scholars who are interested in the history and culture of late antiquity, the history of education, literacy, the ancient economy, and the history of science and mathematics.

"Rome in Egypt's Eastern Desert collects Prof. Cuvigny's most important articles on Egypt's Eastern desert during the Roman period. From the excavations of the forts that she has directed have come a wealth of material, including tens of thousands of texts written on potsherds (ostraca). Some of these 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 for periods of time in these remote and harsh environments, supported by an elaborate network of defense, administration and supply that tied the entire region together. The contents have all been published earlier in peer-reviewed venues, but almost entirely in French. All contributions have been translated or checked by the editor and brought up to date with respect to bibliography and in some cases significantly rewritten by the author, in order to take account of the enormous amount of new material discovered in the intervening time and subsequent publications. A full index will make this body of work far more accessible than it now is. This book brings together thirty years of detailed study of this material, bringing to life the geography, administration, military, quarry operations, life in the forts, and the religion and expressive language of the population who lived in them"--