Skip to Main Content

Village Institutions in Egypt in the Roman to Early Arab Periods

Online ISBN:
9780191916069
Print ISBN:
9780197266779
Publisher:
British Academy
Book

Village Institutions in Egypt in the Roman to Early Arab Periods

Micaela Langellotti,
Micaela Langellotti

Lecturer in Ancient History

Lecturer in Ancient History, Newcastle University
Find on
D. W. Rathbone
D. W. Rathbone

Professor of Ancient History

Professor of Ancient History, King's College London
Find on
Published online:
21 January 2021
Published in print:
20 August 2020
Online ISBN:
9780191916069
Print ISBN:
9780197266779
Publisher:
British Academy

Abstract

This volume is the first to survey village institutions in Egypt during the first eight centuries AD, from the beginning of Roman rule to the early Arab period. Despite the many studies of society and administration in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, there are no general studies of village institutions or communities in any one period, let alone in a long-term perspective, or integrated investigation of their relationship to the wider state. This volume, which represents a first response to fill this gap in the current scholarship, aims to demonstrate that Egypt is a particularly productive place to develop study of this subject because the rich documentary evidence of the papyri, a large majority of which comes from village sites, permits us both to study specific topics in detail by place and time, as the eleven papers of this volume do, and also to make comparisons across a long chronological period. These comparisons across time are beneficial because they raise questions about changing patterns and perspectives of the surviving documents, which may skew interpretation, and enable us to outline what seem to emerge as recurrent issues in the power-relationships between central and regional authorities and the rural population, as well as some preliminary indications of the trends in those developments across our period.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close