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Papyrus is a material similar to thick paper that was used in ancient times as a writing surface. It was made from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland sedge. Papyrus can also refer to a document written on sheets of such material, joined side by side and rolled up into a scroll, an early form of a book.
Mummy portraits or Fayum mummy portraits are a type of naturalistic painted portrait on wooden boards attached to upper class mummies from Roman Egypt. They belong to the tradition of panel painting, one of the most highly regarded forms of art in the Classical world. The Fayum portraits are the only large body of art from that tradition to have survived. They were formerly, and incorrectly, called Coptic portraits.
Egypt was a subdivision of the Roman Empire from Rome's invasion of the Ptolemaic Egyptian Kingdom after the battle of Alexandria in 30 BC to its loss by the Byzantine Empire to the Islamic conquests in AD 641. The province encompassed most of modern-day Egypt except for the Sinai, and was bordered by the provinces of Crete and Cyrenaica to the west and Judea, later Arabia Petraea, to the East. Egypt came to serve as a major producer of grain for the empire and had a highly developed urban economy. Aegyptus was by far the wealthiest Eastern Roman province, and by far the wealthiest Roman province outside of Italy. The population of Roman Egypt is unknown, although estimates vary from 4 to 8 million. In Alexandria, its capital, it possessed the largest port, and was the second largest city of the Roman Empire.
Roman commerce was a major sector of the Roman economy during the later generations of the Republic and throughout most of the imperial period. Fashions and trends in historiography and in popular culture have tended to neglect the economic basis of the empire in favor of the lingua franca of Latin and the exploits of the Roman legions. The language and the legions were supported by trade and were part of its backbone. The Romans were businessmen, and the longevity of their empire was caused by their commercial trade.
The study of the Roman economy, which is, the economies of the ancient city-state of Rome and its empire during the Republican and Imperial periods remains highly speculative. There are no surviving records of business and government accounts, such as detailed reports of tax revenues, and few literary sources regarding economic activity. Instead, the study of this ancient economy is today mainly based on the surviving archeological and literary evidence that allow researchers to form conjectures based on comparisons with other more recent pre-industrial economies.
In classical antiquity, including the Hellenistic world of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, historians and archaeologists view the public and private rituals associated with religion as part of everyday life. Examples of this phenomenon are found in the various state and cult temples, Jewish synagogues, and churches. These were important hubs for ancient peoples, representing a connection between the heavenly realms and the earthly planes. This context of magic has become an academic study, especially in the last twenty years.
Tebtunis was a city and later town in Lower Egypt. The settlement was founded in approximately 1800 BCE by the Twelfth Dynasty king Amenemhat III. It was located in what is now the village of Tell Umm el-Baragat in the Faiyum Governorate. In Tebtunis there were many Greek and Roman buildings. It was a rich town and was a very important regional center during the Ptolemaic period.
The Papyrology Collection of the University of Michigan Library is an internationally respected collection of ancient papyrus and a center for research on ancient culture, language, and history. With over 7,000 items and more than 10,000 individual fragments, the Collection is by far the largest collection of papyrus in the country, and offers a glimpse into the everyday life and language of the ancient world. Of keen interest to historians, linguists, classicists, philosophers, archaeologists, as well as others, the collection includes biblical fragments, religious writings, public and private documents, private letters, and writings on astronomy, astrology, mathematics, and magic. The papyri span nearly two millennia of history, dating from about 1000 BC to AD 1000, with the majority dating from the third century BC to the seventh century AD.
Karanis, located in what is now Kom Oshim, was an agricultural town in the Ptolemaic Kingdom, and Roman Egypt located in the northeast corner of the Faiyum. It was roughly 60 hectares in size and its peak population is estimated to be 4000 people, although it could have been as much as three times greater. Karanis was one of a number to towns in the Arsinoite nome established in the third century BC by Ptolemy II Philadephus, and lasted until the 6th century AD. Though Karanis declined in the late Ptolmaic period, in the first century BC, the town expanded north when Augustus, having conquered Egypt and also recognizing the Faiyum's agricultural potential, sent workers to clean up the canals and restore the dikes that had fallen into decline, restoring productivity to the area.
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of manuscripts discovered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by papyrologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.
The Heroninos Archive is a collection of around a thousand papyrus documents, dating to the third century AD. They were found at the very end of the 19th century at Kasr El Harit, in the Faiyum area of Egypt by Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt. The archive is named after Heroninos, the phrontistes of the estate whose records make up a large part of the collection.
Gaius Claudius Severus was a Roman senator who lived in the second half of the 1st century AD and the first half of the 2nd century AD.
Dominic Alexander Sebastian Montserrat was a British egyptologist and papyrologist.
Latin was the official language of the Roman Empire, but other languages were regionally important, such as Greek. Latin was the original language of the Romans and remained the language of imperial administration, legislation, and the military throughout the classical period. In the West, it became the lingua franca and came to be used for even local administration of the cities including the law courts. After all freeborn male inhabitants of the Empire were universally enfranchised in 212 AD, a great number of Roman citizens would have lacked Latin, though they were expected to acquire at least a token knowledge, and Latin remained a marker of "Romanness".
The Apion family was a wealthy clan of landholders in Byzantine Egypt, especially in the Middle Egyptian nomes of Oxyrhynchus, Arsinoe and Heracleopolis Magna. Beginning as a local aristocracy, it rose to prominence in the 5th, 6th and early 7th centuries when several successive heads of the family occupied high imperial offices, including the consulship. After the Sasanian conquest of Egypt, the family disappeared.
Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 581 is a papyrus fragment written in Ancient Greek, apparently recording the sale of a slave girl. Dating from 29 August 99 AD, P. Oxy. 581 was discovered, alongside hundreds of other papyri, by Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt while excavating an ancient landfill at Oxyrhynchus in modern Egypt. The document's contents were published by the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1898, which also secured its donation to University College, Dundee, later the University of Dundee, in 1903 – where it still resides. Measuring 6.3 x 14.7 cm and consisting of 17 lines of text, the artifact represents the conclusion of a longer record, although the beginning of the papyrus was lost before it was found. P. Oxy. 581 has received a modest amount of scholarly attention, most recently and completely in a 2009 translation by classicist Amin Benaissa of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
Elisabeth R. O'Connell is a curator in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum with responsibility for Roman and Late Antique collections. She is particularly known for her work on late antique Egypt and monastic communities.
Sitta von Reden is a German ancient historian and Professor of Ancient History at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg. She is particularly known for her research on ancient economics, and the social and cultural history of the Graeco-Roman world.
Jane Rowlandson was a British historian who specialised in the economic and social history of Egypt during the Greek and Roman periods. She was a lecturer in Ancient History at King's College, London for 16 years, retiring in 2005. In 1996 she published the influential book Landowners and Tenants in Roman Egypt. She died in 2018.
Walter Eric Harold Cockle FSA was an historian of the ancient world at University College London. He specialised in papyrology and is particularly known for his work on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri and his many entries for The Oxford Classical Dictionary. He produced a new edition of Euripides' partly-lost tragedy Hypsipyle based on a meticulous re-examination of the surviving papyrus fragments and was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1987.
References
- ↑ Dominic Rathbone. The Center for the Tebtunis Papyri, University of California Bancroft Library. Retrieved 19 May 2015.
- 1 2 Professor Dominic Rathbone. King's College London. Retrieved 19 May 2015.
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