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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 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 here both helps to refine the relationship of the archaeological layers belonging to the élite house and those below it, and to shed 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.

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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).

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An in-depth archaeological reportfeaturing graffiti found during a recent excavation at the Ancient Greek cityof 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 in-depth archaeological reportfeaturing graffiti found during a recent excavation at the Ancient Greek cityof 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.

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Until very recently, the idea of ancient Jewish sciences would havebeen considered unacceptable. Since the 1990’s, Early Modernand Medieval Science in Jewish sources has been actively studied, but the consensus was that no real scientific themes couldbe found in earlier Judaism. This work points them out in detail,and posits a new field of research: the scientific activity evidentin the Dead Sea Scrolls and Early Jewish Pseudepigrapha. Thepublication of new texts and new analyses of older ones revealscrucial 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 andphysiognomy, marking the first comprehensive attempt to accountfor scientific themes in Second Temple Judaism. They investigatethe meaning and purpose of scientific explorations in an apocalyptic setting. An appreciation of these topics paves the way toa renewed understanding of the scientific fragments scatteredthroughout rabbinic literature. The book first places the Jewish material in the ancient contextof the Near Eastern and Hellenistic worlds. While the Jewish textswere not on the cutting edge of scientific discovery, they find ameaningful place in the history of science, between Babylonia andEgypt, in the time period between Hipparchus and Ptolemy. Thebook uses recent advances in method to examine the contacts andnetworks of Jewish scholars in their ancient setting. Second, theessays here tackle the problematic concept of a national scientifictradition. Although science is nowadays often conceived as universal, the historiography of ancient Jewish sciences demonstratesthe importance of seeing the development of science in a localcontext. The book explores the tension between the hegemony ofcentral scientific traditions and local scientific enterprises, showing the relevance of ancient data to contemporary postcolonialhistoriography of science. Finally, philosophical questions of thedemarcation of science are addressed in a way that can advancethe 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).

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Aksum and Nubia assembles and analyzes the textual and archaeologicalevidence of interaction between Nubia and the Ethiopiankingdom of Aksum, focusing primarily on the fourth centuryCE. Although ancient Nubia and Ethiopia have been the subjectof a growing number of studies in recent years, little attention hasbeen given to contact between these two regions. Hatke arguesthat ancient Northeast Africa cannot be treated as a unified areapolitically, economically, or culturally. Rather, Nubia and Ethiopiadeveloped within very different regional spheres of interaction, asa result of which the Nubian kingdom of Kush came to focus itsenergies on the Nile Valley, relying on this as its main route ofcontact with the outside world, while Aksum was oriented towardsthe Red Sea and Arabia. In this way Aksum and Kush coexistedin peace for most of their history, and such contact as they maintainedwith each other was limited to small-scale commerce. Onlyin the fourth century CE did Aksum take up arms against Kush,and even then the conflict seems to have been related mainly tosecurity issues on Aksum’s western frontier. Although Aksum never managed to hold onto Kush for long, muchless dealt the final death-blow to the Nubian kingdom, as is oftenbelieved, claims to Kush continued to play a role in Aksumite royalideology as late as the sixth century. Aksum and Nubia criticallyexamines the extent to which relations between two ancient Africanstates were influenced by warfare, commerce, and politicalfictions. 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).

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