Professor Roger Bagnall, NYU: The Economy of an Egyptian Oasis

Friday, October 28th, 2011

5 pm

Eaton Humanities 1B80

Recent excavations in the Dakhla Oasis in the western desert of Upper Egypt have shed new light on a set of economic and social issues often debated on the basis of the papyrological documentation from the Nile valley. These concern the nature of agricultural settlements that depend on larger villages or cities, the 'epoikia' of the papyri. These have been used to argue for various views of the development of the late antique Roman economy, and particularly for the growing importance of wage labor against traditional tenancy, but no one has ever excavated such a settlement and examined how the archaeological context could allow a sense on the ground of how the proposed arrangements worked. Excavations at Ain el-Gedida, Amheida, and Kellis help to fill this gap and complicate the picture considerably.

Roger Bagnall is the Leon Levy Director and Professor of Ancient History at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World of New York University.

This lecture is free and open to the public. Everyone is welcome.