Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

pattern of land ownership; status of peasants 339
Fig. 11 The sixth-century monastery of a holy man, Elias, excavated at Scythopolis, in Palaestina II.
A is a hall or perhaps an open courtyard; B is the chapel. Many of the rooms had fine mosaics,
including inscriptions commemorating the patrons and asking for God’s blessing on them. The
intended tomb of one patron, ‘Maria’, was within the chapel (which she paid for); another patron, ‘John
the ex-prefect’, is thought to have been buried in the small chamber C. (After Fitzgerald (1939) pl. ii)
(phrontistēs) and protector (kourator) long after his father’s death. 50 This looks
remarkably like a small aristocratic ‘Eigenkloster’, of a kind very familiar in
the early medieval west, and designed to provide for both the spiritual and
the material needs of a family.
For the estates of the secular landowning class, the information at our
disposal is limited – except, again, in Egypt. Here, from the papyri, a rich
and varied picture can be built up. There were some huge Egyptian estates,
such as that of the Apion family, who perhaps held as much as two-fifths
of all the land in the neighbouring districts (nomes) of Oxyrhynchus and
50 Keenan in ch. 21c, pp.633,4 below; Thomas (1987) 61 and 64.
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