Recent Discoveries at Amheida
Roger Bagnall (ISAW Leon Levy Director)
RSVP required to info@arceny.com
NOTICE: Admission to the ISAW Lecture Hall closes 10 minutes after the scheduled start time
--Reception to follow
This lecture will describe the discoveries made in the past five seasons of excavation at Amheida, in the Dakhla Oasis of Egypt’s Western Desert. The NYU-based international team working at the site has completed the excavation of the Roman baths and of the area of the Temple of Thoth, extending the history of temple-building at Amheida back to the New Kingdom. New areas have included a sizable fourth-century mortuary church and a house even larger than the house of Serenos that was excavated in earlier seasons. At the same time, a replica of Serenos’ house has now been completed, with reproduction of its paintings. And the study of paintings at Amheida has been pursued with an ARCE-funded survey of visible plaster on the site, showing that wall-painting was practically ubiquitous in the larger houses there in the fourth century CE.
Before joining the NYU faculty in 2007, Bagnall was Jay Professor of Greek and Latin and Professor of History at Columbia University, where he had taught for 33 years. During that time he served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Chair of the Department of Classics. Educated at Yale University and the University of Toronto, he specializes in the social and economic history of Hellenistic, Roman and Late Antique Egypt. He has held many leadership positions in the fields of classics and papyrology; he is co-founder of a multi-university consortium creating the Advanced Papyrological Information System. Among his best-known works are Egypt in Late Antiquity (1993), The Demography of Roman Egypt (1994; with Bruce Frier), Reading Papyri, Writing Ancient History (1995), Early Christian Books in Egypt (2009), and Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East (2010). His edition (with Giovanni Ruffini) of the first volume of Ostraka from Trimithis inaugurated ISAW's series of digital books. He has also edited many volumes of papyri and other ancient texts. He directs NYU's excavation project at Amheida (jointly sponsored with Columbia) in the Dakhla Oasis in Egypt. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the Académie Royale de Belgique, as well as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy.
Bagnall is one of the general editors of the 13-volume Encyclopedia of Ancient History, which appeared from Wiley-Blackwell in November 2012. Other current projects include the editing the graffiti from the basilica in the agora of ancient Smyrna and publication of texts from the excavations at Amheida and Berenike.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW), the American Research Center in Egypt, New York Chapter (ARCE/NY), and Hands Along the Nile Development Services (HANDS).