Report to the Workshop ConText II, December 10-12, 2021, Online
by Stefanie Schmidt
Due to the pandemic, the ConText II workshop planned in presence had to take place online. Archaeologists and text editors from the excavations of Aswan, Elephantine, Dayr Anba Hadra, Hisn al-Bab, Philae and Qasr Ibrim met over three days to discuss their research across sites.
Like last time (ConText I, 2018), the archaeological sources were discussed on the first day, while the textual sources were presented on the second and third days of the workshop. During the coffee breaks, there was the opportunity to exchange ideas on a digital platform (wonder.me),1 where one could participate in changing discussion rounds by means of an avatar.
Extra sessions for Arabic, Greek, and Coptic texts on Saturday and Sunday morning (11 am to 1 pm) were tailored to the needs of those who wanted to meet separately in order to discuss difficult readings in their texts or other textual issues.
Archaeology
Aswan
Wolfgang Müller and Mariola Hepa kicked off the conference with a lecture on continuities and changes in the settlement of Roman Syene. Even though the modern urban areas do not allow the study of ancient Syene as a whole, discontinuities in the settlement history can be detected in some places, marking a transition from the Roman-Byzantine to the Islamic city. Work in area 32 has shown, for instance, that the limits of the Roman, early Islamic and Fatimid town were situated to the north of this area. W. Müller, who is the leading field archeologist, presented recent findings from northern areas and the center of the Roman town around area 94 and 84. M. Hepa supported the archaeological evidence with her study of the pottery of different areas, which showed locally produced and imported vessels. The following discussion demonstrated how important a stratigraphic assignment of ostraca is also to the text editors.
Hisn al-Bab
Pamela Rose reported on recent findings in Ḥiṣn al-Bab, the largest fortified enclosure at the border between Egypt and Nubia which is being investigated by the Austrian Archaeological Institute (Cairo branch) since 2011. The site lies about 1.5 km south of Philae and consists of two fortresses, the earlier of Late Roman date, probably identical with the “camp of the Moors” (kastron tōn maurōn) known from a (re-dated) mid-seventh century (or later) papyrus, the latter, partly built upon the Roman camp, dating to the Abbasid times with a probable beginning in the early ninth century. P. Rose, who is the leading archaeologist of the site, presented on the history of the camp and discussed major questions that arose with evidence of combat activities, probably dating to the early seventh century, that led to the abandonment of the fort.
Philae
Jitse Dijkstra and Roxanne Bélanger Sarrazin presented a new project carried out at the Temple of Philae. The Philae Temple Graffiti Project (PTGP) aims to study the figural graffiti from the temple complexes that count about 400 different types. They are assisted herein by Sabrina C. Higgins, whose expertise lies in religious studies and papyrology, and Nicholas Hedley, a spatial interface designer who records the graffiti with 3D geographic visualization methods. In the following discussion, overlaps with the graffiti project of Dayr Anba Hadra became obvious, where inscriptions are recorded by different methods.
Dayr Anba Hadra
Sebastian Olschok, leading field archeologist of the site, presented on the development of the economic area of the monastery. He traced the various stages of the monastery’s development, which made it clear that an enlargement must have taken place as early as the 9th century. Olschok presented findings on the installations of a bakery, a silo in the monastery, the production of wine and garum.
Gertrud van Loon discussed the wall paintings in Dayr Anba Hadra and convincingly concluded that drawings show artistic influences from monasteries from the North of Egypt and from Nubia. She discovered similarities with portraits from monks in Bawit dating from the 7th / 8th centuries and fom manuscripts that show the same arrangement of colours similar to those from Dayr Anba Hadra.
Texts
Aswan
Sofía Torallas Tovar who studies the Greek ostraca from Roman and Byzantine Syene gave an overview of papyri and ostraca that had been excavated in ongoing field work. She counted 276 ostraca and 143 papyri from Syene what is much fewer than the evidence from the neighbouring island Elephantine with 2.035 ostraca and 715 papyri S. Torallas Tovar gave insight into an economic archive that was found in area 88 which dates from the middle imperial period and contains 7 letters from the same person. The evidence is being analysed together with M. Hepa who will provide the archeological contexts for the ostraca.
The Arabic documents from Aswan are studied by Amalia Zomeño and Naïm Vanthieghem. The corpus includes Arabic private letters and magical texts, but also tax documents referring to Copts and Nubians in the First Cataract. In the workshop, N. Vanthieghem presented an ostracon that mentions a new bishop from Aswan called Betrus who was in office in the 8th century AH. He, moreover, talked about a papyrus from the Carlsberg collection (edited together with T. Hickey (Berkeley) and S. Schmidt (Berlin)), probably to be dated in the 7th century, which mentions the supply of a certain number of people from Syene who were ordered to produce armour for the caliph.
The Arabic tombstones from Aswan provide prosopographic information which also includes a person’s date of death. However, exploiting this data for studies of early Islamic history of Aswan is insofar a problem as these tombstones had been removed from the cemetery and brought to Cairo, apparently without proper registration. Stefanie Schmidt presented her new studies on the epitaphs archived in the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo. She elaborated on the problem of provenance of these tombstones and proposed two formulas which according toher studies were used in Aswan funerary contexts in the 8th and 9th centuries. These two formulas can help to identify the provenance of stones for which until now a provenance was unclear.
Elephantine
Verena Lepper, project director of the ERC project „Elephantine: Localizing 4000 Years of Cultural History. Texts and Scripts from Elephantine Island in Egypt“ gave an overview of the work that had been carried out since 2015, for instance, the development of modern technological procedures to make also closed papyri roles readable without opening the fragile objects.
Jan Moje, who is a team member of V. Lepper’s project, investigates the Demotic texts from the island. He gave an overview of the different types of texts that were found in excavations going back to the first excavations at the beginning of the 20th century and presented the latest yet known documentary Demotic text from the island which dates from the time of Septimius Severus.
Matthias Müller is working on yet unpublished Coptic ostraca which had been unearthed during the excavations on the site of the Khnum Temple carried out by the German Archeological Institute Cairo in cooperation with the Swiss Institute for Architectural and Archaeological Research on Ancient Egypt in Cairo. The texts contain letters that were found in the domestic area of the former temple court yard which point to storage places and possibly a wine merchant.
Ahmed Kamal studies the Arabic texts from Elephantine in V. Lepper’s project. The significance of the Arabic documents from Elephantine lies in the fact that we have not much evidence of how the society on Elephantine developed in the Islamic period and to what extent – or if at all –, it differed from that in Aswan. In his presentation Kamal elaborated on sources which are available for the late role of the Rabīʿa tribe in Islamic Aswan and Elephantine.
Qasr Ibrim
Geoffrey Khan is the editor of the Arabic texts that had been found in Qasr Ibim and which had close relations to the leading elite from Aswan. Most of these letters are from merchants or members of the Arab tribal group known as the Banū al-Kanz to the Nubian viceroy. Together with Robin Seignobos, an expert in cross border relations at the Medieval First Cataract, he presented letters which had been sent from Aswan to the eparch of Nobadia around the 12th century. R. Seignobos elaborated on a particular letter that was sent by a member of the famous family of Ibn Zubayr. The letters provide much information on royal chronology and provide further evidence for the unification of the kingdom of Makouria and Alodia in the 12th century.
Joost Hagen presented a dossier of four Coptic letters which can be dated to the summer of 760. They mention a new governor of Aswan and a courier that the governour of Egypt has sent to the Nubian king on the matter of fugitive slaves. The letters contain many new names and are thus of utmost importance for the history of border relations under the early Abbasids.
Dayr Anba Hadra
Coptic epigraphic evidence from the monastery which lies on the Nile’s west bank opposite Aswan is analysed Lena Krastel. In her presentation she discussed an endowment of bishop Apa Abraham from the 8th century which came down to us in the form of a Coptic inscription. The inscription was discovered already in the 19th century and read by several scholars. However, L. Krastel could improve the reading of several parts of the inscription, for instance, the full title of the diocese which included Syene and Elephantine. Krastel pointed out that the land endowment could have been made to Dayr Anba Hadra and thus form part of the monastery’s landed property.
Another inscription from the monastery was presented by Sebastian Richter, who had been in charge of the Dayr Anba Hadra project until 2018. It contains historic information about an attack on Aswan, that could have taken place already in the earliest Muslim history of the region. However, since the date cannot be deciphered, also the 9th century or even the Medieval period is likely. In the following discussion with the archeologists, an early date was excluded due to the dating of the wall it was found upon.
Ralph Bodenstein, who is in charge of the secondary inscriptions inside the monastery and head of the project at Dayr Anba Hadra, together with Anna Chrysostomides, who studies the Arabic graffiti, presented their new discoveries on who frequented the monastery in the Medieval period. Contrary to previous assumptions they could make plausible that most of the graffiti were not made by Hajj pilgrims, but by members of a Sufi community that met at the monastery.