For those in Berlin on the 12 and 13 May 2017, a conference is taking place at Freie Universität that draws together scholars working on religious institutions in Egypt from the Old Kingdom to the Islamic Period, utilising archaeological and textual sources. The programme can be viewed here. In terms of Coptic monasteries, the meeting will …
Continue reading The Economic Organisation of Religious Institutions in Egypt
The Danish Egyptology Society (Dansk Ægyptologisk Selskab) has its spring 2017 seminar tomorrow, Saturday 4th March, in which the focus is on the body (the programme can be viewed here). Together with Anne Austin (tattooing at Deir el-Medina) and Lise Manniche (premature/stillborn children), I will be speaking at the event on the topic of Coptic funerary textiles. …
After a long period of slackness regarding monkscamelsandwine, I'm returning with renewed vigour and a new section: Dear Apa. Apa is a very common monastic title in late antique Egypt and ubiquitous in texts written within, to, and from monastic communities. Men and women in Egyptian villages wrote to respected elders to ask for their …
On 18th December 2015, a workshop will take place in Berlin on current research concerning the monastery of Deir Anba Hadra at Aswan (also known as the Monastery of Saint Simeon), which is currently being excavated by the German Archaeological Institute. The workshop (programme available here) includes papers by the Deir Anba Hadra team on a range of …
In the Wadi Sarga corpus, two things that are mentioned frequently (in fact, the two most common things) are wine and camels. There are a huge amount of receipts for wine delivered to the monastery – this single category of text accounts for almost one-third of the published texts (and so far, I've identified 40 more …
Since 2009/10, I have been studying the corpus of texts written at the monastery of Apa Thomas at Wadi Sarga, a valley ca. 25 km south of modern Asyut in central Egypt. In 2013, I held a British Museum Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, in order to study and photograph the …
Monks, Camels, and Wine 