ARCE-PA Lecture Thursday, October 14 - "Amheida: Excavating a Town in the Dakhla Oasis"
Lisa Swart
Dear Friends of ARCE-PA,
The Pennsylvania Chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt proudly presents:
“Amheida: Excavating a Town in the Dakhla Oasis”
DR. ROGER BAGNALL, New York University, New York
Thursday, October
14th, 6:30 PM
Classroom 2, Penn Museum
Amheida is a large town site in the Dakhla Oasis, located in the western desert
of Upper Egypt about 850 km southwest of Cairo. It was occupied from the Old
Kingdom through the fourth century CE, when it was a city named Trimithis. It
is located a few kilometers from El Qasr, where the Roman garrison was
stationed in late antiquity and which is now the best-preserved Ottoman
mud-brick town of the oasis. Amheida's surface remains are of the Roman period
and include the only standing mud-brick pyramid of that period, now partially
restored to stabilize the structure. Seven seasons of excavations have brought
to light a large, upper-class house with both mythological and decorative wall
paintings, a smaller, middle class house, a fourth-century school with Greek
poetry of the walls, hundreds of decorated and inscribed blocks of the
now-destroyed Temple of Thoth, and parts of the Roman baths. The excavations
are part of a semester-in-Egypt program sponsored originally by Columbia
University and now by New York University's Institute for the Study of the
Ancient World. In this lecture, the project director, Roger Bagnall, will
present a survey of the excavation's objectives and results, including its
strategy for site conservation and presentation.
Before joining the NYU faculty in 2007, Bagnall was Jay Professor of Greek and Latin and Professor of History at Columbia University, where he had taught for 33 years. During that time he served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Chair of the Department of Classics. Educated at Yale University and the University of Toronto, he specializes in the social and economic history of Hellenistic, Roman and Late Antique Egypt. He has held many leadership positions in the fields of classics and papyrology; he is co-founder of a six-university consortium creating the Advanced Papyrological Information System. Among his best-known works are Egypt in Late Antiquity (1993), The Demography of Roman Egypt (1994; with Bruce Frier), and Reading Papyri, Writing Ancient History (1995). He has also edited many volumes of papyri and other ancient texts. He directs NYU-Columbia's joint excavation project at Amheida in the Dakhla Oasis in Egypt. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the Académie Royale de Belgique, as well as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy.
$5 general admission, $3 Penn Museum members/students, FREE to ARCE-PA members.
--
Lisa Swart, PhD
Vice President, Pennsylvania Chapter
American Research Center in Egypt
3260 South Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
(215) 746-2071
www.arce-pa.org
v...@arce-pa.org