Medieval Archaeology | 2019
Book Reviews
Abstract
These two works — one with a focus on the archaeology, one with a focus on the documentary evidence — look at two very different types of community in late antique Egypt, but their complementary approaches do much to shine a light on the lives, thoughts and experiences of people who are not of the 1% that much/most scholarship, by necessity, focuses on. Both seek to escape the dominance of the hagiography of the Egyptian monastic saints, and the power of major landholders does not intrude too much. Both scholars examine the agency of people in constructing their lives; both also challenge pre-existing academic discourses: in Brooks Hedstrom’s work, particularly narratives about the value of the late antique Egyptian material that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries, and in Ruffini’s, pictures of a late antique society crushed by the oppressive weight of the State and the powerful. Brooks Hedstrom’s examination focuses on a variety of monasteries and, alongside the archaeological evidence of buildings, material culture and landscape, makes use of a wide range of documentary evidence including papyri and graffiti. Chapters 1 and 2 contextualise the examination of the archaeological material: the first focuses on excavations of the 19th and early 20th centuries, their conduct and the attitudes of scholars and others to the material culture of Coptic monasticism; Chapter 2 examines later work and stresses how finds were subordinated to the texts in early histories and the gradual emergence of ‘proper’ archaeology of these sites. This chapter also deals with the relationship between Byzantine archaeology and theory, with Brooks Hedstrom arguing that the discipline should benefit substantially from engagement with theory due to a previous lack of such engagement. Chapter 3 examines the landscape, while the documentary evidence is considered in Chapter 4, which includes assessments of the real and idealised landscape and a useful assessment of what the inhabitants of these settlements called their homes. Next, the literary evidence is explored, asking what the texts tell us about the way the landscape was viewed and constructed. Chapters 6 and 7 look at the archaeology for dwelling places in Egypt, monastic housing at Bawit and a range of monastic built environments from across the region, respectively. Overall, Brooks Hedstrom’s work is a compelling assessment that displays the diversity of monastic spaces in Egypt and undermines previous pictures that relied on simple narratives, derived from the literary material, of a divide between anchorite and organised monasticism in terms of their built spaces. Ruffini’s book, meanwhile, analyses one particular community, accessed largely through an archive of a family’s papyri of AD 506 to 587/8. Essentially it is a microhistory of a large village in Egypt (Aphrodito) while at the same time it speaks for other such communities around Egypt and occasionally touches on cities, as when the protagonists of the papyri travel to the court in Constantinople or move to live in the capital of the province. After positioning the village in relation to the rest of Egypt and examining its society in Chapter 1, Chapters 2, 3 and 4 examine elements of law, order and tax, with Chapter 2 focusing on violence (perhaps surprisingly, Ruffini does not engage much with Bryen’s 2013 book Violence in Roman Egypt). Chapters 5 and 6 look at the land and crafts and trades respectively. Chapter 7 examines religion from the perspective of