Report to the Workshop ConText III, December 16-18, 2022, Berlin
by Stefanie Schmidt
After the last meeting had to take place online, this year’s ConText could again be held in presence. Archaeologists and text editors from Austria, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, the UK and the USA met for three days at the Free University of Berlin to discuss their research on excavations in Aswan, Elephantine, Dayr Anba Hadra, Hisn al-Bab, Philae and Qasr Ibrim.
Friday, December 16th
Archaeology
Hisn el-Bab
The FWF-funded project (P31169) in Hisn el-Bab ended in 2021, but many questions are still unanswered. While the focus of the last ConText workshop (2021) was on the archaeological remains, this time the project leader Pamela Rose (Austrian Archaeological Institute), gave insight into the finds and raised the question of the economic connections of the fortress. In this respect, the origin of the pottery is remarkable: while transport vessels and table ware are of Aswan origin, storage jars come from Nubia and cooking ware is mixed. The discussion focussed on the question of the ethnic origin of the inhabitants of the fortress, with the tenor being that they were of Nubian origin with economic and political ties to Byzantine Egypt.
Aswan
Wolfgang Müller (Swiss Institute for Architectural and Archaeological Research on Ancient Egypt in Cairo), the field director of the Joint Swiss-Egyptian mission at Old Aswan (project leader C. van Pilgrim), informed the audience in his lecture on new findings in areas 95, 96, and 84, all lying in the center of Roman Syene. Area 95 lies to the west of Area 2 and to the south of the Temple of Isis (Area 1). There, three pharaonic stelae were found that adorned the inner faces of the walls of a room of a Late Antique house. They bear Greek proskynema inscriptions and show throning Pharaonic gods, Khnum among them. While they were clearly part of the original design of the building, they were – after the house had been in use for some time – covered with a thin layer of mud-plaster and thus made invisible. Remarkably though, there were not defaced or in any way damaged. The purpose of the house is yet unknown, but it could have served as a club house. Area 96 was excavated by a team of the Joint Mission under the direction of Mohamed Abdel Baset, Said el-Rawy,Hala Mohamed and Mohamed Abdel Raziq from the Aswan Inspectorate of the MoTA. It is located to the east of Area 15 and to the west of Area 14 in the centre of Roman Syene. Excavations produced further stelae, nicely decorated with musicians like harp players. Earlier findings in Area 84, situated to the north-west of the Temple of Isis, were presented to complete the picture of this part of the town. There, a room of a prestigious building showed painted walls and a terrazzo floor, further evidence of the high social status of the neighbourhood.
Dayr Anba Hadra
In her talk, Heike Lehmann, building researcher of the Dayr Anba Hadra-Team, explored the connection between liturgical practice and sacred space in the monastic church. She discussed how the construction of the church was influenced by the genius loci and how the church was built and remodelled according to liturgical concepts typical for the time and region.
For this, Lehmann related the organization of space to each other, especially the setting of liturgical elements as the altar, pulpit and lakan in various building phases of the church with questions on practice of religious rites. She compared observations with other churches in Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia. Furthermore, she discussed the function and origin of architectural elements such as the domes on squinches, of which the latter point to an influence outside Egypt and intertwining development with Muslim architecture in Egypt at the same time. In the discussion, the question was raised about possible comparisons, e.g. to the Islamic cemetery of Aswan and its mausoleums, which could be the subject of further research.
The art historian Gertrud van Loon, who studies the wall paintings in Dayr Anba Hadra, introduced the painting in the eastern semi-dome of the church in the monastery, continuing the study of paintings as presented in the last ConText workshop (2021). Now in a fragmentary state, the complete composition is only known from late 19th century-early 20th century photographs and watercolours. A remarkable element is the square halo of some of the depicted persons. A comparative study of other wall paintings in Egypt and the Mediterranean world makes it plausible that a square nimbus is indicative of a hierarchy and designates a person who is not (yet) canonized or who is still alive when the painting was made. The latter person could, for instance, be the founder of a church or a benefactor in general. Van Loon could hereby draw connections between the decorative programs of churches from Northern Egypt and Nubia.
Texts
Philae
Jitse Dijkstra, principal investigator of the Philae Graffiti Project, presented further results on the graffiti from the Temple of Isis. While in ConText II (2021), the focus of the presentation was on the technical implementation of the project, Dijkstra gave this time an overview of the distribution of graffiti from the Mammisi. A total of 685 graffiti are preserved, of which 411 are Demotic, 3 Greek, 6 Meroitic, 1 Coptic and 1 Coptic/Greek. The project counted 275 figurative graffiti. The distribution of the graffiti is remarkable – while there are more written graffiti on the ground floor (364 Demotic (ca. 81 %) versus 82 figurative (ca. 18 %)), the team found contrary conditions on the roof, where the figurative graffiti predominate (42 Demotic (ca. 18 %) versus 193 figurative (ca. 82 %)).
Keynote lecture
In his presentation “Nubia: ‘Corridor to Africa’?”, the guest speaker of the workshop Jacques van der Vliet raised the question of the identity of Nubia, which, as in the influential work by William Y. Adam of the same title, is perceived in many studies only as a threshold between Africa and Egypt. Van der Vliet, one of the most renowned experts on Coptic Nubia, showed the shortcomings of this construct and pointed to the autonomy of Nubia in a network of mutually influencing identities.
Saturday, 17th December
Aswan
Sofía Torallas Tovar, who is editing the Greek, Latin and Coptic texts from Aswan, presented some of the ostraca she had studied from area 88 in collaboration with Mariola Hepa, and contrasted the results from pottery with the dates of the documents. These contain receipts (laographia, cheironaxion, receipt for wheat, salt and wine signed by Herakleides) and the archive of Akkas and Chairas. The letters are primarily concerned with business and trade matters such as deliveries and loans. Other documents in Greek from area 88 deal with military issues and can be dated based on palaeography to the 2nd century.
Naïm Vanthieghem, who together with Amalia Zomeño is editing the Arabic texts from Aswan, conducted a comparative study of different Arabic text genres from the Edfou and Aswan area. As part of the typological study, he compared forms of receipts, delivery orders, magical texts, private and business letters, all of which have survived on ostraca. Vanthieghem pointed out that it is a peculiarity of the ostraca from Aswan that no text has been found so far that dates before the second half of the 9th century.
Bernhard Palme, who is preparing the Greek ostraca from Kom Ombo for publication, pursued the question of whether Diocletian actually moved the border of Egypt back to Syene. On the basis of a passage in Procopius, he argued against the communis opinio that the emperor had abandoned the Dodekaschoinos and favoured the possibility that Diocletian had strengthened the Blemmyan element south of the First Cataract in order to secure allies in this area. The exact location of the garrisons stationed (according to the Notitia Dignitatum) in Syene, Contra-Syene, Elephantine and Philae is still an open question. The opinion that troops were stationed at the Khnum temple, as favoured by Peter Grossmann, was regarded as problematic by reference to the first ConText workshop (2018), where this hypothesis was discussed among archaeologists and text editors and rejected by a majority.
Stefanie Schmidt, head of the DFG-project “The economy of Aswan” (421143221), addressed in her lecture the topic of arable land in the region of Aswan. On the basis of Greek papyri and archaeological finds, she disproved the thesis that people of Roman Syene / Elephantine did not cultivate land and provided evidence for the accumulation of land by a wealthier class. By identifying great landowners in the region, she argued for similar patterns of land ownership and tenancy as in the rest of early Byzantine Egypt and called for a revision of the common opinion of a region without arable land.
Julia Schulz, student assistant of the DFG-project “The economy of Aswan“ presented the project’s website <https://firstcataract.hcommons-staging.org/>, which not only provides the most important literature on the study of the First Cataract from the Roman to the Islamic period, but also contains summaries of ancient and modern travel accounts to Aswan <https://firstcataract.hcommons-staging.org/antique-travel-reports/> and – after its publication – access to the project’s database <https://firstcataract.hcommons-staging.org/database/>. The bibliography is compiled for the sites of “Aswan”, “Elephantine”, “Dayr Anba Hadra”, “Qasr Ibrim”, “Qubbet el-Hawa” and “Philae” and is divided into “Archaeological Reports”, “Editions” and “Overall Studies”.
Julius Jürgens, student assistant of the DFG-project “The economy of Aswan” gave insight into the project’s database. The aim of the database is to publish artefacts that have been distributed to collections all over the world and make these accessible for further studies on the region (excluded was Egypt on grounds of practicality and papyri / ostraca which will be edited individually). The focus is on objects from the 5th to the 9th century that may be related to Aswan, Elephantine, Dayr Anba Hadra or Qasr Ibrim either because they were found in these places or because additional information makes an original provenance from these areas likely, such as for instance if pottery was made of Aswan pink clay. Basic information will include dates, material, finding place, acquisition history, further literature and a picture of the object. The database will be accessible at the end of the project via the project’s website and the Propylaeum platform of the library of the University of Heidelberg https://www.propylaeum.de/en/home/.
Verena Lepper, principal investigator of the ERC-project “Elephantine” could not attend due to a sudden illness.
Matthias Müller, who is editing the Coptic ostraca found in the Late Antique/early Islamic settlement around the Khnum-temple on Elephantine, spoke about editions of two longer text fragments – a business and a private letter. The business letter requests the delivery of 1,200 bricks and involves a secretary and an epikeimenos. The private letter is addressed to an anchorite who is informed that the sender could not come to meet him. In the later discussion, the question was raised whether the anchorite possibly belonged to the monastery / church on Elephantine.
In his talk about the Arabic ostraca from Elephantine, Ahmed Kamal presented a selection of the ostraca he will publish as part of the ERC-project “Elephantine” (V. Lepper). The ostraca were found during the German excavations on Elephantine carried out by Otto Rubensohn and Friedrich Zucker in the early 20th century and are now archived in the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection Berlin. Kamal presented Arabic private letters, lists, accounts, receipts, and a business letter all dating from the 2nd century onwards dealing with money issues and taxes (kharāj).
Adam Łajtar, who together with Agata Deptuła is preparing the Greek Christian literary texts from Qasr Ibrim for publication, gave an overview of the different categories of texts that can be classified as “Old”, and “New Testament”, “Apocrypha/Patristica”, “Hagiographica”, “Liturgica”, “Magica” and “School Exercises”. They were excavated in the so-called South Church, the cathedral or its vicinity, and could have largely originated from a library of a church, perhaps the cathedral itself. The corpus includes, for instance, fragments of the Acta Sancti Georgii and Acta Sancti Mercurii, the homily on the Cross attributed to Saint John Chrysostom, different prayers and hymns as well as amulets.
Joost Hagen is editing the Coptic literary (ca. 90) and documentary (ca. 40) texts found in Qasr Ibrim between the 1960s and early 1990s. In his talk, he presented “Letter C”, one of four letters that date from the year 760 which was being sent in the aftermath of a Blemmyan attack. Although the sender and addressee of the letter are unknown, the epitheta of the unnamed addressee suggest that the letter was written to the Nubian king himself.
Geoffrey Khan, who is editing the Arabic documents from Qasr Ibrim, presented letters to the eparchs Uruwi and Iesu as well as to the representatives of the eparchs Uruwi and Darma, all dating to the 12th century. The business letters, some of which were written by merchants from Aswan, mention diplomatic and trade missions with the Nubian king south of the second cataract. Goods traded included slaves, horses (which were transported on ships) and textiles.
Sunday, 18th December
Dayr Anba Hadra
Sebastian Richter, head of the Dayr Anba Hadra project until 2019, presented two Coptic inscriptions that provide further insight into the history of the monastery and the region of Aswan. One of them was found in the southern aisle of the monastery church and refers to a historic event that had taken place in the region of Aswan. It reports an attack on the town and its surroundings in a 10th indiction of a year 383 or 583. Since it remains unclear whether the annual details refer to a Diocletian or a Saracen era, the historical event can only be narrowed down to the years 666/67, 866/67, 993/94 or 1187/88, whereas the earliest and latest dates could already be excluded on palaeographic reasons.
Lena Krastel, who studies the Coptic funerary stelae and secondary inscriptions from the monastery, gave an overview of the chronological and spatial distribution of the dated Coptic secondary inscriptions in the church (ca. 170), the Qaṣr (ca. 80) and the economic complex (ca. 40). The earliest inscription attested to date is from 956 CE, while the most recent dates from 1404 CE. Krastel pointed out some linguistic peculiarities such as Arabic letters in Coptic words and related formulaic patterns and onomastics of graffiti, dipinti, and funerary inscriptions to each other.
While in the first ConText workshop (2018) the opinion prevailed that the Arabic visitor inscriptions of the 13th and 14th centuries were made by Hajj pilgrims – an idea that had already been held since Monneret de Villard – Ralph Bodenstein, head of the Dayr Anba Hadra project since 2019, made it now plausible that the “Hajjis” were actually followers of ṣūfī orders. Bodenstein recognised a pattern in the graffiti, according to which visitors described themselves as followers of a ṣūfī leader. Dayr Anba Hadra, which was no longer on the pilgrimage route at that time, could have become a point of attraction for ṣūfī visits, although the reasons for this are still completely unclear.