The Amheida Excavations Featured in the New York Times

The NYU Amheida Excavations were featured recently by multiple news outlets, including Newsweek (Nov. 6, 2024) and more extensive coverage in the New York Times (Nov. 8, 2024).

In 2023 the Amheida Excavations, sponsored by ISAW/NYU since 2008, completed the excavation of an early, fourth-century funerary church at the site of ancient Trimithis (modern Amheida) in the Dakhla Oasis of Egypt. This past September, the archaeology of the church was published as the seventh book in the Amheida series under the imprint of ISAW Monographs, a joint-venture of ISAW, The NYU Press, and the NYU Division of Libraries: Early Christianity at Amheida (Egypt’s Dakhla Oasis), A Fourth-Century Church, Volume 1 by Nicola Aravecchia (Archaeological Field Director for the Amheida Excavations).

The church is remarkable for a variety of reasons. It is one of the earliest churches in Egypt to be systematically excavated, and certainly one of the earliest funerary churches. The team recovered 17 people interred in the church: 11 in two of the three underground crypts and six people on the ground floor of the church and one of its adjacent buildings. The ages and genders of the people are also interesting: there is a preponderance of females and a large number of adolescents and children, including neonates.

Finally, the architecture and decoration are noteworthy. The church is a basilica-type, and the fact that we find this in a village church at the edge of empire by the mid-fourth century shows how quickly it had become the de facto standard for church architecture after Constantine's reign. 

Hypothetical reconstruction of the interior of the church at Trimithis at night. Source: C. Ullendorff, in N. Aravecchia, Early Christianity at Amheida (Egypt's Dakhla Oasis), A Fourth-Century Church (Amheida VII), ISAW/NYU Press, 2024, Fig. 6. 14. Credit: The NYU Amheida Excavations.

Conservators and illustrators working on fragments of collapsed painted ceiling in Room 1. Source: N. Aravecchia, Early Christianity at Amheida (Egypt's Dakhla Oasis), A Fourth-Century Church (Amheida VII), ISAW/NYU Press, 2024, Fig. 6.3. Credit: The NYU Amheida Excavations. Although the church was poorly preserved, some portion of the painted ceiling--an intricate pattern of interlocking geometric shapes--was saved after it collapsed and was subsequently buried, and from this we gain some idea of the church's decorative program.

The national coverage was precipitated by the publication of extended interviews of Director David M. Ratzan by the NYU News (Oct. 28, 2024) and of Dr. Nicola Aravecchia in the Ampersand (Nov. 4, 2024), the news magazine of the School of Arts and Sciences  at Washington University in St. Louis. The national coverage also spawned a number of notices in the international media (e.g., Nov. 16 in Denmark).

For more information about the Amheida Excavations, including reports and bibliography, please see its project page.

For information about ISAW Monographs, the series in which Amheida VII was published (the 18th book in the series), and other publications by ISAW, please see the ISAW Publications page.

For those interested in Dr. Aravecchia's book on the church at Amheida, it is available through the NYU Press.