Amheida III

Ostraka from Trimithis, Volume 2

Roger S. Bagnall, Rodney Ast

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479840717
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: History

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.

PART I

INTRODUCTION

1. INTRODUCTION

The ostraka published in this volume come from the excavations of the seasons from 2008 to 2013. Two of those seasons were disrupted by external causes: in 2009, a delay in the issuance of military security clearances, which shortened the season by nearly three weeks; and in 2011, the evacuation of the team during the Egyptian revolution, after only a few days of excavation. The richest finds of ostraka came from the even-numbered years of 2008, 2010, and 2012. The decision to cut off the present volume after the 2013 season reflects not only the considerable quantity of material in hand but the arrival, if not at a conclusion of work in and around Area 2.2 (Building 6) and 2.3 (Building 7), at least at a point beyond which they seem unlikely to yield texts that would significantly change the picture derived from the first two volumes. (The 2014 season in fact found few ostraka.) In addition, work in Area 4.1 (the Temple of Thoth) is essentially complete, at least for the present, with the 2013 season. The 2014 season there yielded more decorated blocks and some Demotic and hieratic ostraka, but few Greek texts. The texts in the present volume have helped to add coherence to our understanding of the texts in volume 1, to which some improvements are given in an appendix at the end of this volume; perhaps more significantly, the analysis of their archaeological contexts has helped sharpen the distinctions between types of material and the contexts that produced them and has improved our grasp of chronology. Although the introduction to volume 1 described the contexts of the ostraka in some detail, and subsequent discoveries have only confirmed the correctness of most of the analysis given there, we now can see the particulars laid out there in a more coherent general framework. We have for this reason organized volume 2 to give priority to categories of archaeological contexts, ordering the texts by type within these categories. We have particularly come to see that our body of texts is dominated by ostraka that found their way to their findspots through ancient processes of dumping and reusing waste.

2. ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONTEXTS

In volume 1, the archaeological contexts have been described under the headings of the three areas of the site from which the ostraka have come: Area 1 (mainly Area 1.3, i.e., House B2), a house with adjacent street and courtyard in the north part of the site, located on the widest street of the city (S1);¹ Area 2 (mainly Area 2.1, House B1, the “House of Serenos”), the central area of the site as we see it today, located to the east of the temple area; and Area 4 (mainly Area 4.1, the temple area), the highest hill of the site, on which was located the precinct of the Temple of Thoth (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Plan of Amheida.

The ostraka in Area 1 came predominantly from levels connected with the occupation of B2, although some of the contexts are not very secure, as a result of severe deflation caused by wind erosion. There was no excavation in Area 1 since 2007 until the initial seasons of work by the team from the University of Reading (now CUNY), led by Anna L. Boozer, in spring 2012 and 2013. The small groups of ostraka from those seasons are reserved for later publication.

The ostraka from Area 4 come entirely from insecure contexts, because of the extreme degree of mixing of material from different levels that has occurred as a result of treasure-hunting, stone-robbing, sebbakh-digging, and wind erosion. It can in general be said that although in a few places specific contexts with stratigraphy of the Old Kingdom, Second Intermediate Period, and the Late Period have survived, the characterization of find contexts as insecure remains true for the parts of Area 4 excavated in 2008–2013. As a result, all ostraka from Area 4 are presented in a single section of this volume, without attention to the stratigraphic units in which they were found. It may be assumed that none came from a secure context capable of providing useful information.

In Area 2, the situation is far more complex. Already in volume 1 it was possible to distinguish material located under floor levels and thus presumably in place at the time of construction from that accumulated during the period of occupation, particularly during the phase after the partial renovation of B1 around 350. The stratigraphy of B1 and of the courtyard area of Rooms 9 and 10 immediately to its north is described in detail in volume 1. There are just a few texts from this area included in the present volume, as they were found in sorting pottery in years after 2007. As work continued to the north of this zone and in the adjacent streets, and then in Areas 2.2 (Building 6) and 2.3 (the church, B7), it has become increasingly possible to see that the stratigraphic pattern is in large part common to the entire area and to distinguish the ostraka by broad categories of contexts. At the same time, further distinctions can be introduced to take account of the building histories of the individual structures and streets (Fig. 2). This more nuanced picture allows us to describe these contexts under four broad categories:

(1) Windblown sand in the uppermost layers excavated. This sand is not a secure context in any instance, but it is our observation that the material found in such layers is almost always from the period of occupation, and we have therefore included such layers in the broad category of occupational debris. These ostraka have in many cases probably come to their location at the time of excavation as a result of being left on rooftops or other surface levels, although it is not excluded that some sherds used for wall or vault chinking could turn up in such levels. We have in particular kept the possibility of chinking sherds in mind when dealing with apparently anomalous texts in this group.

Figure 2. Plan of the House of Serenos (Building 1).

(2) Identifiable occupation levels, with materials accumulated during the period in which the buildings were lived in or actively used. Here again, there is often the possibility that chinking sherds coming from wall or vault collapse can find their way into the upper parts of occupation debris.

(3) Material dumped in preparation of the site for construction, and always found below the lowest floor (or street) levels. This material will have accumulated over a shorter or longer period before construction and quite possibly at another location at Amheida. It may have varying degre...