Explores the history and archaeology of two oases, remote but closely tied to the Nile valley for thousands of years.

This new volume in the Oasis Papers series marks the 40th anniversary of archaeological fieldwork in the Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt’s Western Desert under the leadership of Anthony J. Mills and presents a synthesis of the current state of our knowledge of the oasis and its interconnections with surrounding regions, especially the Nile Valley. The papers are by distinguished authorities in the field and postgraduate students who specialise in different aspects of Dakhleh and presents an almost complete survey of the archaeology of Dakhleh including much unpublished, original material. It will be one of the few to document a specific part of modern Egypt in such detail and thus should have a broad and lasting appeal. The content of some of the papers is unlikely to be published in any other form elsewhere. Dakhleh is possibly the most intensively examined wider geographic region within Egypt.

The Archaeology of Imperial Landscapes examines the transformation of rural landscapes and societies that formed the backbone of ancient empires in the Near East and Mediterranean. Through a comparative approach to archaeological data, it analyses the patterns of transformation in widely differing imperial contexts in the ancient world. Bringing together a range of studies by an international team of scholars, the volume shows that empires were dynamic, diverse, and experimental polities, and that their success or failure was determined by a combination of forceful interventions, as well as the new possibilities for those dominated by empires to collaborate and profit from doing so. By highlighting the processes that occur in rural and peripheral landscapes, the volume demonstrates that the archaeology of these non-urban and literally eccentric spheres can provide an important contribution to our understanding of ancient empires. The 'bottom up' approach to the study of ancient empires is crucial to understanding how these remarkable socio-political organisms could exist and persist.

Through an analysis of recently discovered Ptolemaic pottery from Mut al-Kharab, as well as a reexamination of pottery collected by the Dakhleh Oasis Project during the survey of the oasis from 1978–1987, this book challenges the common perception that Dakhleh Oasis experienced a sudden increase in agricultural exploitation and a dramatic rise in population during the Roman Period. It argues that such changes had already begun to take place during the Ptolemaic Period, likely as the result of a deliberate strategy directed toward this region by the Ptolemies. This book focuses on the ceramic remains in order to determine the extent of Ptolemaic settlement in the oases and to offer new insights into the nature of this settlement. It presents a corpus of Ptolemaic pottery and a catalogue of Ptolemaic sites from Dakhleh Oasis. It also presents a survey of Ptolemaic evidence from the oases of Kharga, Farafra, Bahariya and Siwa. It thus represents the first major synthesis of Ptolemaic Period activity in the Egyptian Western Desert.

[Italiano]:Questo volume è la prima opera dedicata ai contatti tra latino e copto nell’Egitto tardoantico e bizantino. Esso si pone nel solco di un rinnovato interesse per quest’area multilingue e multiculturale, ma affronta un tema inesplorato con l’obiettivo di dimostrare che questo può essere indagato con profitto. I contributi esaminano fonti di diverso tipo sulla base di un approccio pluridisciplinare. Alcuni di essi affrontano temi di ampio respiro, come la presenza del latino in contesti monastici o scolastici accanto a varietà locali, mentre altri trattano questioni circoscritte, come l’uso del latino in determinati ambienti o in specifici documenti. Tutti i contributi mostrano che il contatto tra lingue, scritture e culture ha assunto forme diverse a seconda di vari fattori./[English]: This volume is the first work devoted to the contacts between Latin and Coptic in late antique and Byzantine Egypt. It follows in the footsteps of a renewed interest in this multilingual and multicultural area, but it approaches an untapped theme aiming to show that it can profitably be explored. The papers examine different type of evidence on the basis of a multi-perspective approach. Some of them deal with wide-ranging issues, such as the presence of Latin in monastic or scholastic contexts alongside local varieties, some others deal with specific subjects, such as the use of Latin in a certain milieux or in specific documents. All papers show that the contact between languages, scripts and cultures took many forms depending on various factors.

This second collection by Roger Bagnall brings together a further two dozen of his studies, this time covering Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Egypt, published over the last thirty years. Many of the articles deal with issues of historical and papyrological method: the restoration of papyrus texts, the direction of archaeological work in Egypt, economic models for Roman Egypt, the usefulness of postcolonial theory, and approaches to the defective literary tradition for the Library of Alexandria. Others concentrate on particular bodies of evidence, ranging from inscriptions to ascetic literature, from registers to women's letters.