Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

636 21c. egypt
orchards with trees of various kinds – date palms, olives, mulberries, citrons,
acacias. 121 There were monasteries outside the village and numerous
churches within. Also within were private houses, some of reputed grandeur,
and in one part of town, houses owned or formerly owned by a shepherd,
a vetch-seller, a cook, a smith, a headman and a priest. 122 There must
also have been houses or shops in which artisans plied their crafts – smiths,
fullers, carpenters, weavers, the boatwrights who made wickerwork skiffs for
canal and river travel – and where wine merchants sold their wares. 123 There
were walled-in gardens in the residential areas; a record office, storehouse,
threshing-floor, guardhouse; an olive works on Isis street; potteries and a
monastic hostel. 124
The sense conveyed by all of this – when added to the agrarian dealings of
Apollos, the literary efforts of his son, and the villagers’ journeys to
Constantinople – is one of vitality, activity and variety, not, as was once
maintained, ‘appalling dullness’; and the sense of variety might be further
developed by appealing to other archives: the Taurinus archive from
Hermopolis, for example, with its landowning soldiers and bureaucrats, or
the Patermuthis archive from Syene (modern Aswan), with its border
guards and boatmen, house sales and inheritance disputes. 125 The
Dioscorus archive ends with unfortunate abruptness with a document of
no great significance, a pasture lease dated to 5 April 585; 126 but Dioscorus’
village reappears in the early eighth century with another important (and
final) Greek-Egyptian archive, embodied in the correspondence between
the district pagarch, Flavius Basilius, and the Arab governor of Egypt,
Kurrah ibn Sharik. There the linguistic shift from administrative Greek to
Arabic is clearly seen to be under way. 127
The intervening years, in particular those down to 642, were marked by
a turbulent and confusing rush of events, of great significance for Egypt
and for the Byzantine empire at large. The record, especially for events set
forth in the damaged, biased but invaluable Chronicle of John, bishop of
Nikiu, 128 gives an unremitting series of examples of courage and cowardice,
carnage and cruelty on all sides. There was, of course, the familiar
street violence in Alexandria, ignited by politics and religion, tempered at
121 See esp. P.Mich. xiii 666, cf.P.Cair.Masp. i 67097 r, iii 67300.8–9, P.Lond. v1695.4–9, P.Michael.
122 48.16–17. P.Cair.Masp. i67002ii24(grand old houses); P.Mich. xiii 665.
123 Evidence in MacCoull (1984) (�MacCoull (1993b) ch. xx). Comparable variety in other Egyptian
locales: Fikhman (1965) (in Russian).
124 Calderini (1966) 303–414: P.Lond. v1691, P.Cair.Masp. i 67109 (gardens); P.Flor. iii 285 (olive
works).
125 Taurinus archive: BGU xii, with extensive introduction by H. Maehler, cf. now also Palme (1994).
Patermuthis archive: P.Münch., P.Lond. v1722–37, with Farber (1986) and the series of articles in BASP
126 127 27 (1990) 111–62. P.Cair.Masp. iii 67325 iv r. See e.g. P.Lond. iv, cf. Abbott (1938).
128 Charles (1916).
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