The House of Serenos. Clementina Caputo
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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)
INTRODUCTION
Amheida is located in the western part of the Dakhla oasis, 3.5 km south of the medieval town of El-Qasr (Figure 1).1 Known in Hellenistic and Roman times as Trimithis, Amheida became a polis by 304 CE, as evidenced by a papyrus from Ismant el-Kharab/Kellis.2 Trimithis in fact served as the major administrative center of the western part of the oasis for the entire fourth century CE.3
The site dates back to as early as the Old Kingdom and was occupied as late as the late fourth century CE. The extension of the visible ruins is approximately 2.5 km north–south and 1 km east–west.4 Two brief exploratory seasons at the site (Amheida: Dakhleh Oasis Project site no. 33/390-L9-1) took place in 1979–1980 by the Dakhleh Oasis Project (DOP), directed by Anthony J. Mills.5 Among other features, the survey revealed several kilns for small-scale production of ceramics dated to the Roman period (Area 1), which have been cleaned and mapped.6 The systematic archaeological excavations at Amheida, which started in 2004,7 have been carried out by an international team under the sponsorship of Columbia University, and since the 2009 season by New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. The project is directed by Roger S. Bagnall (ISAW); the archaeological director is Paola Davoli (University of Salento, Lecce); and the pottery study has been supervised by Pascale Ballet (University of Paris Nanterre).
Archaeologists have so far divided the site into 11 areas (Figure 2),8 four of which are under excavation. Area 1 is characterized both by private houses (so far, only House B2 was excavated in its entirety) and workshops that developed around one of the main streets (S1) of the settlement, and it presents highly diversified pottery, dating from the early Empire to the beginning of Late Antiquity.9 Area 2 is a residential area at the base of the hill that dominates the urban area, characterized by large private decorated houses and public buildings, in which ceramic materials are mainly dated to the fourth century CE. So far, four buildings have been excavated in Area 2: House B1 (Area 2.1); a school of rhetoric and Greek (B5 – Area 2.1); a Late Roman public bath (thermae) (B6 – Area 2.2); and a church (B7 – Area 2.3).10 Area 4, on top of the central hill of the site, shows remains of successive temples with different construction phases dating from the New Kingdom to the Roman Period and a deep stratigraphy that testifies to earlier occupations dating back to the Old Kingdom.11 Area 8 is a densely settled quarter at the northern limits of the city, in which the investigation of a domestic complex (B10) dated to the late third and beginning of the fourth century was undertaken in 2015.12
Most extant written remains from Amheida