Report to the Workshop ConText I, December 13-15, 2018, Basel
by Eugenio Garosi
Over the weekend of December 13–15, 2018, editors of Greek, Coptic, and Arabic papyri, ostraca, and inscriptions from excavations in Aswan, Elephantine, Dayr Anba Hadra, and Qasr Ibrim met in Basel, Switzerland to compare and discuss their documents. The semi-open workshop “ConText. Greek, Coptic, and Arabic Sources from Aswan, Elephantine, Dayr Anba Hadra, and Qasr Ibrim”, combining a section open to the public with one reserved for closed discussion of the material, was tailored to the needs of the editors, who could thus discuss their as of yet unpublished sources in a small circle. The textual sources date from the Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic period and hail from archaeological excavations, which have been carried out for roughly a century. However, up to this workshop, the text editors had never had the opportunity to compare notes and problems with their colleagues from related excavations and projects. On the first open day of the workshop, leading archaeologists of the four sites in question provided the archaeological context for the workshop by presenting recent research results. The second day was also open to the public and dedicated to brief presentations given by the editors on their corpora. On the last day, closed for the public, the group of researchers was divided according to the language of their documents, in order to discuss diachronic philological issues and to contextualize their own documents with those of other projects.
Archaeology
Elephantine
The archeological context for Elephantine was provided by Felix Arnold, who studied the urban development of the settlement which came into being after the destruction of the Khnum Temple, in the second half of the 5th until the 9th/10th century. During the 5th century, the archaeological record witnesses the appearance of about 50 houses partially erected within the former courtyard of the Khnum Temple. The recurrent house typology comprises two or—less often—three floors, usually with one room for each floor. Findings of ceramics resonate with Roman-Western material culture and a comparison with other camps built in temple sites (e.g. Taposiris Magna) possibly hints at a military settlement. Parallel to this building phase, people began to settle outside the temple walls as well; some of these houses continued to be used beyond the 7th century, others were built over and continuously inhabited until the 9th or 10th century. In the 2nd half of the 6th century, the pronaos in the temple area was turned into a church, probably with the later addition of a chapel with a saint’s tomb. Arnold points out that numismatic evidence declines progressively throughout the 6th century, disappearing altogether in the 7th, which indicates a contraction of the settlement. Similarly, ceramics findings decline progressively into the late 7th and early 8th century. Evidence hints at a new period of prosperity in the town during the 9th century. It is around this time that a large complex with adjacent storerooms was erected at one site of the former Khnum Temple. Despite secondary differences, the house typology evidences essential continuity from the Roman to the early Islamic period. Long-term transitions are, however, evidenced by items of material culture. In particular, starting with the 9th century, glazed ceramics from Yemen and China supplemented local pottery. Concomitantly, findings of linen decrease progressively and evidence for wool increases throughout the early Islamic period.
Aswan/Syene
While Elephantine was the leading town of the region since the Old Kingdom, Syene on the eastern shore of the Nile took over its administrative and economic position during the course of the Greco-Roman period. It quickly gained significance and became a trading and cultural crossroad between Nubia and Egypt throughout the antique and Islamic period. Wolfgang Müller, supervising the ongoing excavations since 2005, presented the site and the occurring problems of excavating in an active urban environment. A major issue is that most antique and medieval remains lay beneath the modern town, limiting archaeological exploration to selected areas and rescue excavations. Still visible monuments in the city area include the Isis temple, which could be the Church of Mary, and the so-called Temple of Domitian. Similar to what can be observed in Elephantine, excavated houses indicate substantial continuity in habitational typologies between the late antique and early Islamic phase. Overall, during the early Islamic period, the city underwent a phase of urban development, surpassing its late antique boundaries. A map of the ancient city can still not be drawn to detail, but archaeologists are getting closer to defining its structure.
Dayr Anba Hadra
Sitting on the Nile’s west bank opposite Aswan, the monastic complex of Dayr Anba Hadra represents one of the best-preserved monasteries of medieval Egypt. An archaeological survey of the site (FU Berlin, TOPOI/DAI, under the direction of T. S. Richter), presented by Gertrud van Loon, has evidenced two main phases of building activity. The first nucleus of the monastery, including the chapel or church in the “cave of Anba Hadra” with wall paintings, a building in the economic quarter, and perhaps the oldest part of the so-called qaṣr, most probably dates to the 6th–8th centuries. During a second phase in the 9th–10th century, the erection of a new church destroyed part of the cave. The walls around the monastery and part of the monastic buildings most likely date to this period. The buildings and wall paintings underscore connections with Middle Egyptian as well as Nubian monastic complexes and churches.
Qasr Ibrim
Inhabited continuously from Pharaonic until Ottoman times, the fortress of Qasr Ibrim (200 km south of Aswan) in Roman times operated as a military outpost (Pamela Rose). As the seat of the Makurian eparch, Qasr Ibrim continued to function as an important relay zone between Christian Nubia and early Islamic Egypt. As a result of the flooding of Lake Nasser, the lower part of the settlement is lost to archaeological assessments. Artefacts recovered at the site include textual evidence in eleven languages, most of which are derived from dumping contexts. This to a greater extent hinders the reconstruction of their original archaeological context.
Texts
Elephantine
Elephantine is blessed with an unparalleled continuous textual evidence in a wide spectrum of languages stretching into the late antique and medieval period. The area of the Khnum Temple has yielded a wealth of epigraphic and documentary evidence. Most prominently, 180 graffiti and 15 steles have been discovered in the temple’s forecourt (Jitse Dijkstra). These include (mostly) figural as well as textual items in both Greek and Coptic. From the epigraphical testimonies, it can be inferred that the temple area functioned as a surrogate agora. Further Greek and Coptic ostraca were found in open spaces in the temple area. A preliminary scrutiny by Matthias Müller has established that the Coptic ostraca are prevalently of economic nature, including accounts and debt acknowledgements as well as name-tags and writing exercises.
An ERC project run by Prof. Verena Lepper in Berlin aims at collecting all texts (in Ancient Egyptian, Coptic, Aramaic, Greek, Arabic, Latin, and Nubian) from the island in a comprehensive database. Presently, the database comprises entries for 367 Coptic texts on papyrus and—more numerously—ostraca, containing debt acknowledgements, lists, letters, accounts, and writing exercises, with isolated attestation of hymns/prayers, and possibly medical/magical texts under study by Andrea Hasznos, most of it unpublished. Even in the Berlin Papyrus Collection, where the finds of the excavations led by Otto Rubensohn and Friedrich Zucker are held, there is ample unpublished material as Fritz Hintze published only thirteen ostraca; these have been discussed and published again in several other publications. Most documents of legal pertinence feature a common single witness validity clause—oftentimes the scribe himself. Some documents can be grouped into individual dossiers, such as those of the bilingual scribe David, son of Mēnas, and of the moneylender Raipositos. Some items can also be adjoined to the Patermouthis archive, for example a personal letter on an ostracon. To this day, the Coptic materials have yet to yield any evidence for literary texts. The few literary text fragments preserved from the region quite possibly originate from Dayr Anba Hadra, on the western bank of the Nile.
Much more plentiful is the corpus of Greek ostraca uncovered in Elephantine, which amounts to ca. 1.500 already edited specimens and roughly as many still awaiting publication (Ruth Duttenhöfer, member of the ERC project). Chronologically, the texts can be repartitioned in two main phases: An older group datable between the 1st and the 3rd century and a later one datable from the 4th to the 6th century. The mention of military personnel, i.a. of an auditor, hints at a military environment, which may provide rare textual evidence of the early army unit encamped in the former temple courtyard.
The Arabic evidence from Elephantine is being studied by Ahmad Kamal, who is likewise a member of the ERC project in Berlin. His talk focused on the relation of the Aswan region with Nubia as mirrored in the Arabic documents. Among the texts he discussed was the well-known marriage contract P.AbbottMarriageContracts 1, and an order for payment/delivery for wool (O.Bankes 203).
Aswan/Syene
The bulk of the textual evidence for early Islamic Aswan stems from the so-called Fatimid cemetery, which has yielded several thousand funerary steles in Arabic, currently dispersed over collections worldwide. Stefanie Schmidt presented a new Arabic funerary inscription and discussed methodological difficulties of studying the dispersed Aswan Arabic tombstones. Unclear or incomplete catalogue registrations, in particular, have led to uncertainties pertaining to the origin and exact number of Arabic funerary steles possibly found in the ‘Fatimid’ cemetery. Prosopographical data, in particular, can be mobilized effectively as a complement to museum archaeology for surveying the Aswan epigraphic dossier.
Similar to neighboring Elephantine, the textual material from Aswan covers a variety of languages. Especially the ostraca unearthed at the site include texts in Aramaic, Greek, Demotic, Latin, Coptic, and Arabic. Little more than a dozen Greek ostraca examined by Sofia Torallas Tovar offer a wealth of information on the Roman military unit stationed in Aswan and its interaction with the local civil society. The bulk of the dossier consists of accounts, with the addition of two Greek and one Latin letter respectively and shed some light on the soldiers’ local social networks extending from Aswan and Elephantine.
With 120 known specimens, Aswan also represents one of the richest repositories of Arabic ostraca in Egypt. Following the preliminary typology by the editors, Amalia Zomeño and Naïm Vanthieghem, the Aswan Arabic ostraca can be repartitioned in orders for delivery, accounts, receipts, vouchers, letters/epistolary exercises, and magical texts. Paleographic and formal consideration concur on a dating after the 9th century.
Dayr Anba Hadra
Textual evidence, including Coptic and Arabic funerary steles, secondary inscriptions, ostraca, as well as fragments of papyrus, parchment, and paper, has been recovered in both the monastery and its close proximity. Coptic epigraphic evidence analysed by Lena Krastel is spearheaded by a series of Coptic funerary steles of monks dating from the 7th to 9th centuries. All of them are characterized by the standard formula “The day of the remembrance of the blessed N.N.” Surveys have furthermore identified about 300 Coptic secondary inscriptions. These were written on the walls of the monastery by inhabitants and visitors. Most Coptic secondary inscriptions show a standard formulary, which consists of a self-designation and a prayer or request. Twenty-nine Coptic secondary inscriptions provide absolute dates, mostly according to the Era of the Martyrs, but in two cases named after Diocletian. Two inscriptions are also dated according to another dating system: in one case according to the regnal year of a Nubian king, in the other according to the Hijrī year. Dated specimens cover the timespan between 956 and 1404. In addition to the funerary inscriptions and the secondary inscriptions, a sandstone slab found in 1893 commemorated a religious endowment and a donation of agricultural yields by Bishop Abraham of Syene and Elephantine to the town’s poor.
Surveys conducted in the monastery during the years 2014–2018 have further documented ca. 545 Arabic secondary inscriptions (Ralph Bodenstein). The appearance of recognizably Muslim inscriptions from the 10th century onwards, and the concomitant disappearance of Coptic funerary steles, suggests a decay of monastic activity. This is corroborated by the different layers of the Arabic plaster inscriptions in the qaṣr compound, which indicate a progressive rise of the pavement level. Later use of the monastery complex as a settlement is witnessed by both Coptic (up to the 15th c.) and Arabic (up to the 16th c.) inscriptions. Overall, Arabic inscriptions at Dayr Anba Hadra consist of both visitors’ testimonies and devotional tokens. Inscriptions related to the Hajj pilgrimage, in particular, cluster in the later phase of the building between the 13th and 14th century. Furthermore, a group of inscriptions suggests that the monastery at some point became a site of ṣūfī devotion.
Qasr Ibrim
Coptic textual evidence discovered in Qasr Ibrim spans chronologically from the 5th to the 14th century. The corpus comprises of about 90 texts of literary and 40 of documentary nature, most of which are still unpublished. The documentary material analyzed by Joost Hagen can be repartitioned in letters (17) and documents (19). Linguistically, the Qasr Ibrim Coptic dossier is preeminently Sahidic, with the exception of 3 (Sub-)Achminic letters addressed to Tantani, as well as the Bohairic scroll of bishop Timotheos. On a general level, the Coptic letters highlight the role of the site as a relay-zone between Upper Egypt and Nubia.
Workshop-Discussions
The editors of textual sources from Aswan, Elephantine, Dayr Anba Hadra and Qasr Ibrim together with archaeologists working at or on the four sites were asked to share their expertise in an interdisciplinary workshop setting. For orientation, contributors to the workshop were presented with a set of guiding questions some months before the meeting. Specialists in different sources were invited to share prosopographical and geographical information connecting their respective bodies of evidence and/or evidence from different localities. Particular attention was paid to connections to the First Cataract and how these reverberated on the cultural and economic exchanges, as well as the family ties evidenced in the sources from Aswan, Elephantine, Dayr Anba Hadra, and Qasr Ibrim. Participants were furthermore asked to highlight information on local and regional economic and supply structures that might have occurred in the textual and archaeological record. These included mentions of trade-goods, prices, commercial partnerships, and organisation of labour. With particular reference to the supply system, participants were invited to lay out the role of the local agricultural production as a complement or substitutive of external import. Another proposed venue for reflection pertained to governance: Specifically, contributors were invited to share insights into office-holders as well as juridical and judicial institutions and practices operating in the region on one hand, and top-down influences from the provincial capitals of Alexandria and Fusṭāṭ on the other. Finally, contributors were asked to compare residency in Aswan, Elephantine, Dayr Anba Hadra and Qasr Ibrim with reference to social composition and interactions. Particular attention was directed towards information on the cohabitation of the many cultural groups in the region, including Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Participants were organized into two groups based on language expertise. Experts in Arabic and Islamic archaeology, in particular, were asked to address the long-term impact of Muslim presence on the social life, as well as on the economic networks across the border of Egypt and Nubia.