Read more
"Rome in Egypt's Eastern Desert collects Prof. Cuvigny's most important articles on Egypt's Eastern desert during the Roman period. From the excavations of the forts that she has directed have come a wealth of material, including tens of thousands of texts written on potsherds (ostraca). Some of these are administrative texts, but many more are correspondence, both official and private, written by and to the people (mostly but not all men) who lived and worked for periods of time in these remote and harsh environments, supported by an elaborate network of defense, administration and supply that tied the entire region together. The contents have all been published earlier in peer-reviewed venues, but almost entirely in French. All contributions have been translated or checked by the editor and brought up to date with respect to bibliography and in some cases significantly rewritten by the author, in order to take account of the enormous amount of new material discovered in the intervening time and subsequent publications. A full index will make this body of work far more accessible than it now is. This book brings together thirty years of detailed study of this material, bringing to life the geography, administration, military, quarry operations, life in the forts, and the religion and expressive language of the population who lived in them"--
About the author
Hélène Cuvigny is Research Director at the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) and a papyrologist specializing in the eastern Egyptian desert during the Roman period. For more than thirty years, beginning with the excavations at the quarry site of Mons Claudianus, Hélène Cuvigny has played a central role in the exploration of Egypt's Eastern Desert. She has been deeply engaged with the systematic excavation and publication of the texts and other finds from a multitude of sites, including the quarries of the northern zone and the desert forts along the roads from Coptos (in the Nile valley) to the ports of Myos Hormos and Berenike (in the southern part of the desert), which facilitated the Roman Empire's trade with Arabia, India, and East Africa. Professor Cuvigny is the lead investigator for the research program Ostraca of the Eastern Desert at the Institute of Papyrology of the Paris-Sorbonne University and continues to excavate and publish about the exploitation of the Eastern Desert under the Roman Empire.
