The two books reviewed here result from several decades of excavation and study in Egypt's Dakhla Oasis, particularly the Roman-era town of Trimithis (modern Amheida). They draw upon the work of various expeditions including the Dakhleh Oasis Project (1979), but most notably the Columbia University expedition begun by Bagnall, who is a major contributor to the first volume, An Oasis City. The second book, Amheida II, is a detailed excavation report focusing on a single ancient structure – Amheida House B2 – and its material finds.
An Oasis City provides an excellent overview of the site's ancient history and modern excavation, but also includes detailed articles on various aspects of the town's landscape and architectural environments, material culture, and chronological and cultural development. The preface by Bagnall explains that the book originally developed from a lecture series given in Heidelberg in 2010, but in its final format it is no simple collection of papers. Instead the book is organised into thematic chapters with multiple subsections (§1.1, 1.2 etc.), each written by a single credited author. This allows specialists to discuss their own work within the larger framework of chapter topics while still remaining concise – the average section is no more than four pages long.
The first three chapters present basic background information about the site and its significance within the geography and temporal development of Egypt. As part of the Dakhla Oasis, the settlement at Amheida is shown to be distinct from contemporaneous Roman-era settlements in the Nile Valley. Bagnall in particular gives a thoughtful introduction (§1.3) to the special economic concerns of an oasis settlement, including the need for water management, infrastructure, and the cost of travel to and from the Nile valley region over 365 km away. Chapter 2 includes discussion of Amheida itself as an archaeological site, including its pre-Roman phases under New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period pharaohs. Chapter 3 is devoted to studies of the urban landscape of Amheida as the ancient town of Trimithis, and discusses the settlement's plan and overall development. It also includes a few detailed sections on individual structures: Davoli's discussion of the bath houses in Trimithis (§3.2) includes not only a very thorough textual description, but two fully-labelled plans showing its development over time. The following section (§3.3) by Davoli and Bagnall is a very valuable analysis of a group of structures that has been fully excavated by the Amheida team: these two ‘houses’ are described in great detail, accompanied by multiple photos of the extant structures, fully-labelled architectural plans and even modern reconstructions of the buildings, including a replica structure built in 2010 to highlight the original house's extensive wall paintings (further discussed and illustrated in §7.2 in an excellent article by McFadden).
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on religion within the ancient settlement: the pagan temples and later Christian churches are discussed with respect to their excavation, architecture and decoration. It is noted that the main temple of the Roman town was constructed using earlier blocks, mostly pharaonic, hinting at earlier phases of the structure. However, even the Roman-era structure was poorly preserved, and much of its form remains unknown. While carefully avoiding conjecture, the authors are perhaps too conservative here in presenting their evidence: descriptions of colonnades and contra-temples hint at what might have been, but there is little attempt to clarify even their potential relative positions within the temple enclosure. Similarly, Kaper's section (§4.2) on the necropolis and its mudbrick pyramids successfully contextualises the monuments within the larger trajectory of Egyptian funerary traditions, but does not provide adequate spatial context: the text informs us that the necropolis ‘extended south of the city, but there were also funerary monuments to the north’ (p. 112), but there are no maps included which show the necropolis or any of the positions of its particular monuments. In contrast, the early Christian churches of Dakhla Oasis are more thoroughly presented: Aravecchia presents two sections, one on the church at Trimithis itself (§5.1) and another of comparable structures from other parts of the Dakhla Oasis, notably Kellis and ‘Ain el-Gedida (§5.3). These include several fully-labelled plans which orient the reader to the spaces described in the text. The chapter also includes analysis of inscriptions, graffiti and ostraca by Bagnall and Cribiore (§5.2), including a fascinating discussion of pagan religious syncretism with Greek literary culture in early Christian Trimithis.
Chapter 6 discusses the ancient economy, not only of Trimithis, but of all the eastern desert oases, compared to the Nile Valley. Bagnall explains how the ancient administration of Kharga and Dakhla was conceptualised as a single ‘Great Oasis’, and how the various sites within the region functioned together. Of importance too is Aravecchia's contribution (§6.2) concerning rural settlements beyond the larger townsites that served as agricultural centres. Unlike Trimithis, the small peripheral settlement at ‘Ain el-Gedida appears to have lacked a standard organised town plan, leading to ‘questions concerning the nature of the site and the role it had played within the religious, administrative, and economic systems of the oasis’ (p. 157). Aravecchia's article includes excellent detailed plans of the settlement as well as closer detailed images of individual structures, labelled and contextualised in a way lacking in most of the studies of Trimithis itself.
The larger cultural context of the oasis sites is also discussed. These include discussions of governmental and military organisation (§6.3), as well as cultural institutions such as local schools and the larger literary culture in which the elite of Trimithis hoped to situate themselves (§7.1). McFadden's contribution, section §7.2, ‘Amheida's wall paintings’, is a thorough account of the discovery, excavation, conservation, and even recreation of several stunning paintings, as well as a lengthy discussion of those paintings’ larger significance within the corpus of paintings from Greco-Roman Egypt.
The volume is a somewhat puzzling book: while the quality of writing and scholarship for each section is very good, the overall editing is inconsistent, and it is notable that, despite having six ‘contributors’, the book does not credit any specific editor. As a result, the sections remain rather disparate. Authors often reference their own sections but seem largely unaware of the work of their fellow contributors, leading to some unnecessary repetition: the Greek term ‘epoikia’ is introduced and defined first on p. 167 and then immediately again on p. 169 by a different author. Occasionally, the organisation by thematic chapters creates artificial divisions between the scholarship: Bagnall presents two separate sections on onomastics, one focusing on theophorics in the chapter on religion (§4.3) and another on Greek names (§7.3). These could easily have been a single entry.
Other problems with the editing are more systematic and prevent the book from being of use to a wider audience. A chronological table (p. xiii) is provided, and dates are given to the reigns of pharaohs mentioned by name in the text; however, no such details are given for individual Ptolemaic rulers or Roman emperors. The bibliography demonstrates a few major oversights: Davoli's overview of architecture in Greco-Roman Fayum (L'Archeologia urbana nel Fayyum di età ellenistica e romana [1998]) is perhaps the most glaring omission, though many of her more recent works are included. More crucially, the book's figures present a real problem: while photographs and drawings are produced beautifully in full colour, maps and architectural plans frequently lack important labels, and are printed so reduced in scale as to be practically unreadable. Some lack standard cartographic details such as North arrows. Oddly, the site plan for Amheida itself is printed identically twice within the volume (figures 5 and 45). In each case, such oversights could easily have been corrected by a more careful and consistent editor.
While An Oasis City presents a broad overview of the site and its significance, Amheida II takes time to address some more specific questions as to the ancient settlement's development. Boozer, the book's primary author and de facto editor, seeks to fill a specific gap in the academic literature: ‘most previous publications of Romano-Egyptian houses excavations segregated artifacts and architectural elements from their original contexts, with the result that only general statements can be made about domestic assemblages’ (p. 26). Boozer sets out to correct this by combining architectural and spatial analysis of Amheida House B2 with a fully contextualised analysis of all its material finds. Contributions by other authors are limited to chapters on categories of archaeological finds (organised by material and therefore authored by the project specialists who studied them) – Boozer herself contributes to four of these chapters as well.
The book is at heart an excavation report. Chapters 1–3 describe the ancient site's development and the methods of excavation employed by the Amheida team. The final excavation results are discussed in Chapter 4, and Boozer provides not only maps and plans of the walls, but examples of multi-context drawings, stratigraphic layers shown in profile sections and Harris matrices of the layers’ relationships as well as thorough discussion on the phasing of the structure. In Chapter 5 the method of construction of the house itself is discussed. While sadly there are no photos or detailed drawings of the structure's vaults, or any ceiling/roofing for the house, Boozer provides great detail for the walls as well as for preserved features beyond the house structure itself, including bread ovens, courtyard floor construction and even adjacent street surfaces. Of particular interest is her discussion of the mudbricks that make up the walls of structure B2: she includes the corpus of the arrangement of bricks in the ancient walls, an important inclusion often missing from such reports.
Chapter 6 is Boozer's interpretation and theoretical ‘reconstruction’ of the house B2, not only in terms of its physical architecture but also how it might fit into the larger temporal and cultural spectrum of Egyptian housing. In analysing the arrangement of rooms in the floorplan of her structure, she states that ‘clustered patterning of rooms is not common for houses in Pharaonic Egypt’ (p. 160). For this she cites R. Alston (‘Houses and Households in Roman Egypt’, in R. Laurence and A. Wallace-Hadrill [edd.], Domestic Space in the Roman World: Pompeii and Beyond [1997], pp. 25–39), but overlooks more recent studies, notably the work of K. Spence (‘Settlement Structure and Social Interaction at El-Amarna’, in M. Bietak et al. [edd.], Cities and Urbanism in Ancient Egypt [2010], pp. 289–98) on houses at Amarna. Ultimately, Boozer is careful to acknowledge the uneven and limited comparanda for her structure, and mostly limits her discussions to other Roman sites of the Dakhla Oasis as well as the Fayum region.
Chapter 7, ‘Artifact and Activity’, provides an overview of the archaeological assemblage recovered from house B2 and then organises the finds by category of use, including personal appearance, household activities (mostly textile production), trade, religious practice, diet and entertainment. As such they combine many different types of artefacts, regardless of their materiality. For example, papyri and ostraca do not have their own category, but are divided according to content, so texts on weaving are incorporated into a chart along with loom weighs and textile fragments. Jar labels, dockets, and receipt ostraca are grouped together in an analysis on transportation and trade. Through these categories, Boozer attempts to draw out some possibilities for the house's ancient inhabitants with respect to gender, age and socio-cultural identity. She is careful to stress the inherent complexity of using archaeological finds to discuss ancient identity, and she readily admits that the archaeological discovery of material finds does not always reflect precise domestic use in terms of spatial context, but rather modes of disposal and acts of site abandonment, and that the artefact assemblage may reflect the identities of individuals beyond the house itself: neighbours or other inhabitants of ancient Trimithis.
Chapters 8–19 are finds catalogues, organised by materiality and methods of production. Chapter 8 is the ceramic analysis by D. Dixneuf: discussion of the methodological approach, typology, resulting analysis and the catalogue itself are all given in French. Line drawings are provided for all vessels; terracotta lamps are included as small photographs. Artefacts in the other chapters are similarly illustrated. Floral and faunal remains each get their own chapter, with almost no illustration but thorough charts and discussion of attested species as well as their spatial distribution.
Textual finds from house B2 are discussed by G. Ruffini in Chapter 15. Ruffini notes that the preservation of multiple management texts and receipts in a domestic context ‘has interesting implications for use of space in late antique Egypt’ (p. 355), and suggests that the owner of the house may have been an estate manager. However, his study extends beyond house B2 itself and includes ostraca and other inscribed objects from a wider area of the site, which allows him to discuss broader aspects of dating, religious and cultural affiliation of the people of Trimithis.
The final chapter, by Boozer, recaps the integrative approach of the book and once again tackles the complicated topic of recovering ancient identity from the archaeological record. Boozer stresses that, by an integrative study of artefact assemblages contextualised by house structure, ‘we can move beyond normative assumptions that once dominated archaeological thought’ (pp. 416–17) with respect to the identities of the ancient inhabitants of house B2, the town of Trimithis itself and the broader world of Roman Egypt.
However Boozer's arguments are not wholly convincing – specifically because she is not immune to the very ‘normative assumptions’ she warns against. This is especially noticeable with respect to materiality and identity: most jewellery is assumed to have been used by females, and miniature items, including some terracotta figurines of household materials, are described as children's toys. She also occasionally describes objects as if they are discretely Greek, Roman or Egyptian in meaning: amulets, for example, are accepted as proof of ‘traditional Egyptian magico-religious beliefs’ (p. 196), ignoring the possibility of any significant Greek or Roman influence. Adherence to such categories not only presumes that the cultures remained separate and unchanged by Late Antiquity, but that their influences can also be identified easily by the modern scholar as mapped on to ancient artefacts.
Because Amheida II is essentially the excavation report of a single Trimithis structure, the book is unlikely to appeal to many readers beyond serious archaeologists. However, for interested readers, it is an extremely important source not only of data but of thoughtful quantitative analysis and discussion of cultural significance of the excavation's finds. In contrast, An Oasis City contains mostly broad overviews of recent studies rather than detailed analyses of the primary data, but it is likely to find a much wider reading audience (notably, the publishers have made the book available online for free at http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/oasis-city/). Yet when taken together, the two books complement each other very well, providing a thorough and in-depth look at the ancient site of Trimithis and other related archaeological projects in the Dakhla and Kharga Oases.
