Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

620 21c. egypt
papyrus of a.d. 439. A century later, ten churches (at least), named for
Mother Mary, for the Holy Apostles and for various saints (mainly martyrs),
were to be found in the middle Egyptian village of Aphrodito. 28 Churches
like these need not have been large either in their physical structures or in
their congregations, but they were apparently everywhere.
So also were monasteries – of various kinds and in assorted environments:
hermitages in natural caves or in rock-cut Pharaonic tombs on the
line of desert hills above the Nile valley; underground dwellings in the
desert plains near Esna (ancient Latopolis) in Upper Egypt and at Kellia
(‘Cells’) off the western Delta north of Wadi Natrun (ancient Scetis; Fig.
49,p.944 below); Pachomian foundations for communal (cenobitic) living
on the sites of deserted villages in the Thebaid; Melitian and orthodox
monasteries on the Fayum’s desert edge near Hawara; but it just so happens
that in Theodore’s will an especially renowned Coptic monastery comes
into play. For the monastery of Apa Shenoute, heir to most of Theodore’s
estate, was none other than the famous White Monastery (Deir el-Abyad),
built around 440 on the ‘mountain of Athribis’ on the edge of the western
desert hills near present-day Sohâg. 29
Like other monasteries, the White Monastery early on counted on
bequests of necessities to help feed and clothe its monks and nuns in a cenobitic
community reported to number some 4,000 souls; but as time passed
it became an economic force in its own right, able to support by charity thousands
of refugees in times of famine and turmoil. 30 By the sixth century, the
properties of the White Monastery and other religious institutions in Egypt
had become substantial. Besides what it acquired by Theodore’s will, the
White Monastery under its abbot (‘archimandrite’) owned land in the arable
area of the village of Phthla (‘the Cultivation’) near Aphrodito in the
Antaiopolite nome. 31 Through a lay steward (pronoht v), it leased this land
out to a local entrepreneur named Aurelius Phoibammon. He in turn, as
middleman, guaranteed the land’s farming through a series of sub-leases and
work contracts. Similar arrangements must have been in place for the lands
the monastery inherited from Theodore. The monastery as landlord would
have been, like Theodore himself when alive, an absentee. 32
Possibly ironical in all of this is that Theodore’s will is a most decidedly
representative Byzantine Greek document, dictated in Greek for writing in
Greek. 33 It favours a community whose early heads – Pgol, Shenoute, Besa
28 P.Haun. iii 58 (re-edited by J. R. Rea, ZPE 99 (1993) 89–95); P.Cair.Masp. iii 67283.
29 In addition to Bagnall, Egypt ch. 8: Jones (1991); Vita prima sancti Pachomii 12, 54; SB i5174–5, with
McGing (1990); Gascou (1990). White Monastery: The Coptic Encyclopedia iii.761–70. Monastery locations:
Timm (1983). 30 Shenoute, Opera ed. J. Leipoldt, iii.67–71; Leipoldt (1902–3); Kuhn (1954).
31 P.Ross.Georg. iii 48 (sixth century). 32 Keenan (1980) and (1985a).
33 Like P.Cair.Masp. ii 67151 (570), the will of Flavius Phoibammon, chief doctor of Antinoopolis.
Contrast MChr. 319 (sixth century), the will of bishop Abraham of Hermouthis, dictated in Egyptian
for transcription in Greek.
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