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Throughout Egypt's long history, pottery sherds and flakes of
limestone were commonly used for drawings and short-form texts in a
number of languages. These objects are conventionally called
ostraca, and thousands of them have been and continue to be
discovered. This volume highlights some of the methodologies that
have been developed for analyzing the archaeological contexts,
material aspects, and textual peculiarities of ostraca.
A comprehensive edition and commentary of 77 ostraka Ostraka in the
Collection of New York University is a comprehensive edition and
commentary of 77 ostraka, or potsherds with ancient texts written
on them, from Greco-Roman and late antique Egypt. Seventy-two of
these ostraca are housed in NYU Special Collections, originally
purchased by Caspar Kraemer in 1932, then the chair of the NYU
Classics Department. Although Kraemer advertised the imminent
publication of the texts in 1934 and later collaborated with the
famed papyrologist Herbert Youtie, neither completed the project.
The ostraka in this small collection span the 2nd century BCE to
the 8th century CE and include both Greek and Coptic texts. The
majority, however, form a coherent dossier of tax receipts related
to mortuary activities in Upper Egypt during the reign of Augustus
(texts 7-70, dated from roughly the last quarter of the 1st century
BCE to 12 CE). The five ostraka published in this volume not held
by NYU include one that had been part of Kraemer's original
purchase but was subsequently lost (thankfully preserved in a
photograph in Youtie's archive at the University of Michigan), and
four ostraka now held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The
latter four texts were purchased separately and published
previously, but clearly belong to the same group of texts. They are
included in this volume both for the sake of completeness and
because the present authors were able to improve the readings in
light of the context provided by the dossier as a whole. In
addition to the scholarly edition of these texts, the volume
contains a full discussion of their provenance, the taxes involved,
the taxpayers and tax-collectors, and a ceramological analysis of
the sherds as media for these texts. The book will be of interest
primarily to specialists in papyrology and scholars who study the
economic history of the ancient Mediterranean, Hellenistic Egypt,
the Roman empire, and papyrology.
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 full-color 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 in this volume helps to refine the
relationship of the archaeological layers belonging to the elite
house and the layers below it; it also sheds 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.
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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