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Foreword

The work that Clementina Caputo presents to the community of historians and archaeologists of Roman and Byzantine Egypt, and indeed to a wider audience, is the result of an extended research effort carried out in conditions that one might describe as ideal, because it has taken place in the context of multidisciplinary studies and as part of a team of scholars whose competences have made it possible to grasp with some precision the history and immediacy of the use of a ceramic assemblage in the far west of the Dakhla oasis during the fourth century CE, and in the particular setting of Amheida/Trimithis, which acquired the status of polis at the latest by the start of that century.

During the 1980s, when I was studying the workshops and tombs of the Sixth Dynasty and the First Intermediate Period at Balat and ‘Ayn Asil, I had the opportunity to become acquainted, albeit rather rapidly, with this large urban territory and to recognize the existence there of a local ceramic production, rather different from that of Douch/Kysis, which I studied shortly afterward for the Institut français d’archéologie orientale. Later, I returned to Dakhla, this time to Amheida, on the invitation of Roger Bagnall and Paola Davoli, for surveys of the urban territory and for ceramological seminars on site. These provided the opportunity for discussions and exchanges concerning the fabrics and ceramic productions of Trimithis and of Dakhla more broadly. It is thus particularly pleasing to be able to provide a foreword for this work, the product of that working environment.

The work carried out at Amheida, the last large urban settlement of the Great Oasis before one enters the desert zones to its west, has produced an exceptional documentation. The excavation has revealed a city located in a rich agricultural hinterland, with houses, tombs, wall decoration, texts, and other objects that show us its wealth and allow the reconstruction of many of the practices of daily life, from food to education.

For more than forty years, following the pioneering work of Ahmed Fakhry, the sites of the western desert have been intensively explored, and for the Great Oasis—a toponym that comprises both Dakhla and Kharga in the Roman period—the production of information has been quite exceptional. For Dakhla, the first publications go back to the beginning of the 1980s, marked above all by Denkmäler der Oase Dachla aus dem Nachlass von Ahmed Fakhry, the foundational work of Jürgen Osing based on the dossiers of Ahmed Fakhry. Since then, the growth of publications has been largely owed to the Dakhleh Oasis Project (DOP), the federation that served as catalyst for work in this region. Benefiting from the synergy fostered by practices of collaboration and information sharing, the various teams working in the Dakhla Oasis have placed much emphasis on publishing their results. For the Roman period, which is particularly rich in archaeological remains thanks to the excellent preservation of the sites, their monuments, their texts, and their artifacts, the regular publications on ‘Ismant el-Kharab/ Kellis, ‘Ain el-Gedida (the full report on which has just appeared as Amheida IV), and Amheida/Trimithis provide a framework for the analysis of the ancient societies of the western desert of Egypt in the Roman period.

In this particularly stimulating context, the work of Clementina Caputo, assisted by two other young scholars, Julie Marchand and Irene Soto Marín, who took part in the study of the finds, forms the fifth volume of the series Amheida. It offers a systematic study of the ceramic assemblage from the house of Serenos (House B1). Serenos held important civic offices at Trimithis and as a result was part of the local élite. This monograph forms part of a well-grounded archaeological tradition: the typological study of an assemblage and its contextualization, organized into two main sections. In this way it covers all aspects of the production and use of ceramics, as seen in the light of the assemblage found in the totality of the spaces and stratigraphic units of this large house, with its annexes and adjoining streets (Streets 2 and 3). This house was built in part over earlier buildings that had been abandoned, particularly parts of the Roman baths. This construction history explains the variation in type and chronology that characterizes the pottery, ranging from the transition from the second to the third century until around 370 CE.

If Amheida V responds perfectly to the demands of a ceramological publication, it also reflects the extensive documentary, human, and institutional resources on which the author has relied: her thesis on the ceramic supports for writing, based on the finds at Dime (Soknopaiou Nesos) and Amheida, Ermeneutica e semiotica in archeologia : per una nuova interpretazia one culturale della ceramica vascolare nell’Egitto greco-romano, defended at the University of Salento (Lecce) in 2014, co-sponsored by the University of Poitiers. This in turn led to articles on the materiality of texts, particularly in the framework of a postdoctoral program at the Ruprecht-Karls University of’Heidelberg; spatial analyses that she has carried out on the territory of Trimithis; close contacts with Colin A. Hope and his collaborators; and interchanges with the team of el-Deir, in the larger context of a Franco-American program of collaboration directed by Roger S. Bagnall and Gaëlle Tallet, with the participation of the University of Poitiers. From this collaboration resulted the recent collective volume The Great Oasis: The Kharga and Dakhla Oases of Egypt in Antiquity, edited by R. S. Bagnall and G. Tallet (Cambridge, 2019).

Three observations need to be made about the substantive contributions of this book. First, the detailed accounting of all of the contexts and the precision of the ceramological analysis make it possible to distinguish, above all, the sherds used in chinking the vaults of the house, which had been drawn from dumps earlier than or contemporary with the house, from the pottery that belongs to the final use of the living space and to its abandonment. Moreover, this study sheds new light on the relationship, which is often difficult to discern, between the functions of the rooms and their associated material, something uncommon in a domestic context. Thus it becomes possible to sketch a genuine material history of Serenos’ habitation, highlighting the use of the reception rooms and those used to prepare meals, their enlargements and renovations, and in short a nuanced description of these spaces carried out competently and prudently by well-trained young scholars.

My second observation concerns the contextualization of the ceramic documentation in a broader perspective, which, thanks to the circumstances of its discovery, gives us a substantial picture of the production and use of the assemblage, then at its peak in the Great Oasis. In fact, it is in the span from the start to the end of the fourth century that the floruit of its ceramic production may be found. If we still lack much of the data needed to appreciate the material culture of the Nile Valley in this period, by contrast in Dakhla as in Kharga, this is a period of flourishing production, in which the potters’ talents shine, thanks to their knowledge of the larger developments of forms and techniques in the Mediterranean world, but at the same time displaying an inventiveness adapted to their physical setting and their clientele. Thus, despite the meager role played in this assemblage by imports from areas outside Egypt, we may nevertheless observe the existence of a community of forms common to the whole Mediterranean, with, to be sure, many variants and adaptations. Clementina Caputo’s work shows us all of their sources.

The third point concerns local specificity. On the scale of an urban site of this size, in the heart of an agricultural setting with many resources, it is possible to observe a certain degree of autonomy in the production of common ceramics connected both to domestic use and to the processing of foodstuffs. A salient example is the Brittle Wares, no doubt produced from kaolinite-type clays, which were produced either at Kellis or in its immediate surroundings. These constitute a distinctive and original group, finds of which are largely concentrated in the western part of Dakhla. Discovering the origins of the regional ceramic productions of the Great Oasis and establishing their connection to specific urban settlements remains a vital field of research, going well beyond the scope of monographic studies of this type. But such monographs are the indispensable foundation for such future investigations.

Pascale Ballet

Université de Paris Nanterre, UMR 7041, ArScAn – ESPRI

(translated by Roger Bagnall)